Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars : New Directions in a Divided America [1 ed.] 9780268201319, 9780268201296

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Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars

RELIGION AND POLITICS BEYOND THE CULT URE WARS New Directions in a Divided America

HHHHH EDITED BY

Darren Dochuk

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943962 ISBN: 978-0-268-20129-6 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-20131-9 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-20128-9 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction Darren Dochuk

ix

1

P A R T I .   Spirits of Reform 1

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?: Fights for Headship in Church-Labor Solidarity, 1912–1919



Ja n i n e Gi o r d a n o Dr a k e

2

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s



Josep h K i p Ko s e k

3

“The answers were apocryphal!”: Protestantism and the Politics of Pluralism in Phylon’s Early Years



Josef So r e t t

4

“The fulness of the earth is yours”: Environmental Politics in the Mormon Culture Region



Patr i c k Q. M as o n

17

37

56

78

vi Contents

P A R T I I .   Redefining Church, State, and Civil Society 5

“A gauge of our faithfulness”: Religion and the Politics of Immigration Reform



We ndy L. Wa l l

6

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”: How Liberals Revived and Revised the Case for School Vouchers in the 1960s and 1970s



M a r k B r i ll i an t

7

An American Crusade: The Religious Liberty of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union



A nd r e w Pr e s t o n

8

God’s Spooks: Religion, the CIA, and Church-State Collaboration



M atthew Av e r y S u t t o n

101

125

154

178

P A R T I I I .   Faith-Based Act ivism i n an Age of Fract ure 9

Catholic Women Religious in an Age of Fracture Kath le e n S p r ow s C u mmi ng s

201

10 The Occasional Catholics: Faith, Family, and the “Spanish-Speaking” Voter Be n j a m i n Fr a n c i s - Fal l o n

221

11 The Camden 28: Fratres Sororesque in Pace (Brothers and Sisters in Peace) M i c he l l e Ni c k e r s o n

244

Contents vii

12 In Defense of People: Environmentalism and the Religious Right in Late Twentieth-Century American Politics Ke i th M ak o t o Wo o d ho u s e

267

13 Looking Up: Latino Megachurches and the Politics of Social Mobility Kate B ow l e r

290

14 Progressive Politics and Religious Faith Ja m es T. K l o p p e n b e rg

313



340

List of Contributors

Index

344

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume emerged out of a conference hosted by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University in St. Louis. As is typical of Danforth Center events, the Beyond the Culture Wars conference was engaging and constructive in every possible way. Special thanks go to Senator John C. Danforth, whose generous funding of the Danforth Center made this scholarly and public gathering possible. Marie Griffith, director of the Danforth Center, gave the go-ahead and provided all of the generous support to make Beyond the Culture Wars happen; Debra Kennard ensured that the event itself was effectively managed and played out the way its planners could only hope it would play out. I would also like to thank my Danforth and Wash U colleagues, all dearly missed now, especially Lerone Martin, Leigh Schmidt, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Mark Valeri for their continued support of this project, as well as Philip Byers, Anna Holdorf, and Suzanna Krivulskaya, who, at different stages, helped pull this project together.

ix

Introduction Darren Dochuk

Both the text and sentiment of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, left little doubt that America was embroiled in an epic clash with itself. Unleashing the rhetorical fire and provocation that had made him infamous, the politico railed against Bill and Hillary Clinton and his liberal Democratic foes, deeming them an enemy every bit as evil as the Stalinists who had forced America to the brink of destruction during the Cold War. Next, he laid out the terms of America’s new “cold war” and the high stakes of the ­impending presidential election. “Friends, this election is about more than who gets what,” he charged. “It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans.” Feeding off the crescendo of his own words, he ended with a flourish of prophetic urgency that brought an already energized crowd to its feet. “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.”1 With a cascade of us-versus-them, good-versus-evil chatter, Buchanan encapsulated the spirit of his age. To be sure, the rift that ­Buchanan identified in 1992 was one with deeper traction in American society; it was not, in other words, merely an act of political opportunism during an election campaign. It was esteemed sociologist James 1

2 Introduction

­ avison Hunter, in fact, who first introduced the term culture wars one D year before Buchanan’s speech in order to explain the acute partitioning of the U.S. political map. Having investigated hot-button issues such as abortion, gun politics, church and state, and homosexuality, Hunter delineated a sharp divide between two seemingly innate and perpetually oppositional value systems: “progressivism” and “orthodoxy.” According to Hunter, the former—progressives—privileged rationalism and ­re­oriented their faiths to modes of modern life, while the latter—­ conservatives—privileged objectivism and commitment to an external, definable, and transcendent authority. Cautious in his use of the terms, Hunter’s categories nevertheless stuck and were quickly politicized by the likes of Buchanan.2 However much Buchanan’s bluster welcomed and fostered exaggera­ tion, as Hunter showed in his work—and as more recent scholars, such as Andrew Hartman, have shown in theirs—the culture war motif fairly and effectively captured the substantive fissures that emerged in the late twentieth century, and it spoke to the depth of division that demarcated American society on fundamentally contested conceptions not just of gender and sexuality but ultimately of national identity and purpose, individual responsibility and human nature. Indeed, as Hartman writes, the culture wars of the late twentieth century were not just about competing social values (as Hunter proved) but about clashing notions of truth itself, pitting a post-1960s moral relativism against an older, fun­damentalist ­belief that asserted “truth is universal, no matter the cir­cumstances.” In the culture wars moment of the late twentieth century, Americans reached a point like no other in their nation’s history, during which the very authenticity of their state of being and their understanding of their existential condition were being probed, questioned, and thrust into uncertainty.3 It goes without saying that the caustic spirit and uncertainties of ­Buchanan’s age did not dissipate as the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first; quite the opposite. Morally charged concerns that divide progressivism and orthodoxy, as well as debates over the nature of American identity and purpose, and the very nature of truth itself, continue to animate the American citizenry, splitting it into distinctive blocs. More than ever, politicians like the ones who first noticed the benefits of

Introduction 3

polarizing the American voting public for their own personal ends in the 1970s and 1980s continue to stoke the flames of animosity with their heated rhetoric and their framing of single-issue campaigns in momentous terms, as a fight for the very soul of a nation teetering on collapse. As I write this, with President Donald Trump in power, culture war ­politicking has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, with aggressive political posturing, pressing anxieties fed by a seemingly omnipotent and relentless mass media, and a widespread desperation to fix a broken nation a daily norm purposefully nurtured and prodded by the White House’s primary resident.4 While the culture war of the past generation remains a real and ­serious conflagration, with polarization an ongoing concern, stark political divisions of the kind promoted and imposed by politicians and the media do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age. Lost in the clamor of Buchanan’s day—as well as our own—are the more substantial evidences of a robust pluralism that sparked and continues to spark religious and political thought and action across pronounced divides. In his recent book, Confident Pluralism, legal theorist John Inazu acknowledges that “at least some of our most important beliefs cannot be reconciled with one another.” “It cannot be the case,” for example, “that the act of abortion is both morally acceptable and morally in­tolerable. It cannot be the case that God exists and that God does not exist.” The differences Hunter pointed out twenty-five years ago, in other words, are structurally embedded in American society, and they do matter, for everyone. Yet Inazu also asserts in normative fashion that these divisions do not need to be so destructive or paralyzing for this ­nation’s citizenry. American citizens, he charges, need to reclaim their nation’s founding creed of pluralism; embrace differences in beliefs, ­values, and identities without becoming mired in crass and unbending politicking; and, most importantly, reconstruct a robust civil society based on age-old constitutional principles of “toleration over protest, humility over defensiveness, and persuasion over coercion.” If overly hopeful in his assessment, Inazu nevertheless points to the potentials of encounter, engagement, and even exchange that still exist in the vast ­political terrain between the right-left, Republican-Democratic poles that this country’s politicians, pundits, preachers, and lobbyists have

4 Introduction

a­ ccentuated for political gain. Rapprochement as much as trench warfare is the natural order in the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-long American experiment, Inazu insists, and it is time that Americans re-internalize that fact.5 If Inazu’s is a prescriptive challenge to the culture warring that has plagued American society over the past few generations, scholars can and should engage in a descriptive challenge to that same condition. In their own, unintended way, political and religious historians have perpetuated the culture war motif during the past waves of scholarship, in large part by presuming the political discord that Buchanan and his cohort on the political right harped on in an effort to advance their populist revolution. This is not to say that historians have willingly appropriated the politically charged language of stark difference or sought to perpetuate the battles Buchanan helped instigate, but rather that they have tended to write about recent trajectories in U.S. faith and politics through the lens that Buchanan-styled politicos have provided the American public, that which sees the nation (and the world) as inevitably and inexorably combative and bloody terrains. Consider the evolving history of American evangelicalism, for instance. During the past fifteen years, historians of evangelicalism have done much to correct previous scholarly misconceptions, which tended to portray the movement as a marginal political force prior to its purported shotgun wedding with Ronald Reagan in 1980. They have tracked evangelical political ambitions and impact back to the early days of the twentieth century; they have unpacked the complex economic and political circumstances at midcentury, in the time between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, which thrust evangelicals into the forefront of public debate over vital domestic and foreign policy concerns; and they have drastically expanded our knowledge of how, during the 1970s’ “Age of Evangelicalism,” they built on preexisting institutional structures of influence to seize control of the Republican Party and usher it into the post-1980 conservative epoch. Yet, in offering that corrective, historians of evangelicalism have also re­ inforced the notion that the history of America’s twentieth century—­ certainly its post-1945 years—can and should be presented as a tale of perpetual and seemingly inevitable struggle between two diametrically

Introduction 5

opposed classes of fundamentalists and modernists, right-wingers and left-wingers. Recent histories of liberal Protestants and Protestantism have added complexity to that paradigm by mapping out the presence and resilience of “cosmopolitan” and confidently pluralistic faiths in the late twentieth century, as well as documenting the emergence of the ­religious “nones”—“spiritual but not religious” American believers whose numbers have risen dramatically in recent years. These and other recent histories of non-Protestant religious actors have served to remind us that the American religious and political landscape is far more fluid and complex than any history of an ascending and ascendant right-wing evan­gelicalism can convey.6 Still, much of the history of modern American religion and politics continues to be written in a mode that assumes the dichotomies and ­accentuates the us-versus-them embattlements of the modern age. Considering the proliferation of first-wave scholarship on Trump and his steadfast evangelical followers, it is likely that the culture war motif will continue to be a dominant one for years to come, and rightly so considering the heat that the president has generated by playing to the worst fears of those across the entire political spectrum. Recent stellar books examining the religious politics of race and gender in the Trump era are but one sign that the embattlements of today are bitter and real and in need of further attention from historians who can contextualize the most recent dispensation of culture-warring politics in the longue durée.7 While fully recognizing the stark reality of our ongoing culture wars, and the historians’ imperative to parse out the issues, interests, ­values, and collective imaginations that divide the nation, this volume seeks to encourage historians also to pursue histories of modern U.S. ­religion and politics in ways that stretch our narratives and analysis beyond overly static tropes. As a whole, this book’s authors seek to write their histories with a sharp eye for contingencies and temporalities, unintended consequences and counternarratives left unaccounted for and stuck in between the rigid right-left, conservative-liberal binaries that still organize our texts. As a group they agree that political categories are fluid and do not always line up neatly with culture war concerns of the kind highlighted by Pat Buchanan and James Davison Hunter, and that enduring partisan divides can blind us to more complex and dynamic

6 Introduction

inter­sections of faith and politics that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm. Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars provides room for these types of fresh analyses in four ways. First, and most basically where ­methodology is concerned, it attempts to work beyond—indeed, to bridge—“partisan” divides within the field of U.S. history, for instance those that tend to separate the scholarship of religious and political historians. The past twenty-year cycle of religious history has generated much energy and excitement and opened up a vast array of new approaches to measuring the sacred (and the secular) in modern American life. Whether consciously or not, scholars of religion have answered— decisively—Jon Butler’s 2004 clarion call for them to rescue it from the scholarly margins and weave it into the mainstream narratives of U.S. history. Yet many of the insights and interventions of recent religious historiography have gone unnoticed by political historians, whose gazes have typically fallen on matters in Washington or at the Pentagon and the inner workings of the state at home and abroad. This is unfortunate, as it is difficult to i­dentify a subset of modern U.S. history that has been more animated and important in the past twenty years than political history. Whether through grassroots studies of metropolitan and regional politics, attention to political lobbying and inner-beltway trends, or broader surveys of U.S. politics and political culture in international ­contexts, political historians of every stripe and subfield have reconceptualized modern American history as a whole. The outgrowth of a conference that invited prominent political and religious historians to step out of their genres to dialogue with one another, this volume represents their written attempts to offer fresh illustration drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods; compare notes on how best to connect faith and politics in unchartered analytical terrain; and help each other better tell the story not just of twentieth-century religion and politics, but of twentieth-century America itself.8 Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars, secondly, represents a quest by these historians to look beyond the usual suspects (be they Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell or Edith Schaeffer, Phyllis Schlafly, and Beverly LaHaye) who populate (and dominate) culture war narratives to ­reveal the life stories and unheralded political careers of other vital his-

Introduction 7

torical actors. Joining the culture warriors as key actors in America’s track record of faith-based political mobilization, in this regard, are syn­ dicalists, social gospellers, peacekeepers, humanitarians, conservationists, and a majority of hesitant Americans in the middle who have practiced a ­quieter political “spirit of reform” over the past century and labored for religious pluralism as well as their own notions of truth and custodial ­responsibilities in modern society. These include labor activists—some radical, others cautious—who, as Janine Giordano Drake recounts, ­navigated the tenuous labor politics of the early twentieth century by espousing a social gospel that propped up the interests of workers without negating the need for private Christian devotion. They include communalists and agrarian dissenters in the 1930s who, as Joseph Kip Kosek shows, acted out of deeply religious principles and fashioned anti-­ capitalist ­doctrines that assumed both “conservative” and “liberal” intentions by championing an economy anchored in the land and a society organized around decentralized communities of independent producers. As Josef Sorett details, the ranks of a wider and more diverse body of religious-­minded political activists also include Black intellectuals who, through their support of and work with Phylon, the academic periodical established by W. E. B. Du Bois at midcentury, nurtured a civil rights awareness and commitment to democratic justice that bridged the social sciences and popular culture, academy and grassroots, and domestic and global purviews, and sought racial and economic reform through reliance on a liberal, pluralistic, internationalist Protestant confidence. And these ranks also encompass the likes of Mormon conservationists, who, as Patrick Mason explains, applied a theology of dominion passed down to them by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to embrace “the fulness of the earth” in a way that espoused environmental care without downplaying or negating an anthropomorphic emphasis on human privilege and conservative social and economic values. To be sure, there are many other “spirits of reform” that politically animated American religious citizens and communities, including those whose faith traditions functioned well beyond the parameters of Mormonism and Christianity, but in recovering at least a handful of these largely untold stories, these historians encourage us to broaden the canopy of inclusion when trying to render a more comprehensive record of modern American faith and politics in action.

8 Introduction

This volume attempts to look beyond reified culture war binaries and offer fresh analysis in a third way: by revealing other polarities of tension running through American religious and political life and, in particular, coursing through charged political debates over church, state, and civil society as well as the faith-based political activism of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all charted in the second and third sections of this book. As a whole, the chapters in these sections emphasize that our reading of religion and politics in the twentieth-century past must make room for the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that dictated the ways average citizens approached their immediate environments with a desire to reconstruct them. As Michelle Nickerson, Josef Sorett, and Kathleen Cummings illustrate, there is much yet to learn about the way in which religious individuals and groups situate themselves simultaneously in multiple identities and align themselves with sometimes contradictory-­sounding ideologies and spots on the culture wars spectrum. Catholic radical and/or radical Catholic? Black conservative and/ or Black power? Liberal and/or neoliberal? These and other related queries highlight the complex terrains on which religious and political actors grappled with competing claims on them: between patriotism, for instance, and conscientious objection; between the desire to uplift Black Christianity on its own terms and the urge to assimilate it in an imagined Cold War liberal order. And, as the historians herein show, that Cold War liberal order was hardly as unifying or unified as its champions liked to ­purport. Liberal Protestantism itself, one of the generative forces of the so-called liberal consensus, was highly fragmented at this time, its ecclesiology and churchliness defined very differently by its Black and white constituents, and its internal debates and contestations morally charged and complex, and often painfully endured. All this suggest that historians need to be prepared to measure a vast range of personal interests and ­allegiances when accounting for the religious and political mobilization of citizens in the Cold War moment. Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars seeks to move current historiographical conversations forward in yet a fourth way, by underscoring the contingencies, ironies, and surprising commitments and outcomes at the heart of American religion and politics’s recent past. As Wendy Wall, Kathleen Cummings, and other contributors to this volume

Introduction 9

point out, for instance, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics may have banded together in appreciation of a broad-minded civil religion during the 1950s and 1960s, then political liberalism or conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s—an “age of fracture,” as historian Daniel Rodgers puts it—but they often did so for different reasons, and not always (hardly ever, ­perhaps) in unison. It is imperative, therefore, that historians look past rigid culture war binaries of the kind Buchanan exaggerated to appreciate the immediate circumstances and available choices that informed these religious and political actors as they navigated knotty political terrains. The scholars in this volume take that command seriously.9 On that same score, the historians at work in these pages also remind us that bipartisanship has characterized U.S. politics as much as the rigid polarization with which we are more familiar—even though such bi­ partisanship has also often quickly (more quickly than ever in recent decades) given way to rancorous partisan maneuvering. Andrew Preston’s study of liberal and conservative activism on behalf of international human rights reinforces this. In U.S. diplomatic history, he emphasizes, religious liberty—now a particularly hot flash-point issue for Protestant and Catholic conservatives—has a rich, bipartisan, and complicated tradition that both precedes and transcends the recent culture wars. A longer historical view of this issue shows that it was the exclusive preserve of neither conservatives or liberals, Democrats or Republicans, and that it has deep roots within a remarkably broad range of American Protestant internationalist thought. Other authors in this volume extend this type of multivalent analysis in other directions. While Mark Brilliant unearths both the progressive and populist roots of the modern school-voucher system (a system often equated with religious conservative impulses), Matthew Sutton shows how concerns over national security, spying, and the involvement of missionaries in both arenas was cause for concern among Protestant doves and hawks—progressives and evangelicals—alike in the 1970s, a decade that saw the government’s use of religious agents in foreign surveillance operations come under legal attack. At the same time, during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, coalition and consensus building across partisan lines also stalled at key junctures and, amid the rise of the Reagan revolution, transformed religious actors into different (somewhat unpredictably)

10 Introduction

­ olitical agents. A core constituency of civil rights, Democratic, liberal p activism during the 1950s and 1960s, many Latinos, for instance, found themselves shifting course after the 1960s. Kate Bowler and Benjamin Francis-Fallon map the complex religious, economic, and political dynamics that brought them into the Republican fold (with Richard ­Nixon’s Latino strategy paving the way and Latino megachurch pastors following the lead). With Pat Buchanan and his 1992 culture wars speech serving as a launch for his chapter, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, meanwhile, notes the role that environmentalism (and anti-environmentalism) played in animating the religious right. As witnessed in the evolving political life of Richard John Neuhaus, while many conservative Christians initially voiced sympathy for a conservationist ethic, by the 1980s they not only opposed an environmental movement feared to have been radicalized by the left, but also demonized it as the epitome of America’s secular drift. The irony, here, is that in dismissing environmentalists in such totalizing fashion, Neuhaus overlooked the anxieties he shared with them—about individualism and liberal humanism, for instance, and the loss of authenticity and authority in American life. Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars draws to its conclusion in the most appropriate way with a chapter by James Kloppenberg. In his study of progressive politics and religious faith through the ages and up to the papacy of Pope Francis and presidency of Barack Obama (with concluding thoughts on the current presidency), Kloppenberg brilliantly unpacks the range of theological and intellectual impulses that have consistently enlivened consoling, conciliatory, and reformist movements both on the moderate political left and within American Catholicism. As he convincingly shows, these strands of progressive Christian faith run deep in history, and within the Catholic Church they have flourished throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the post-Vatican II ­period. If one wants to better understand Obama and his politics, Kloppenberg asserts, we would do well to appreciate his instruction in and experience with Catholic social teachings and embrace of a broader social gospel of human uplift and reform. Yet Kloppenberg’s chapter also reminds us that the progressive mindset, disposition, and set of sympathies within Christendom—a function of caritas, the commitment to charity and love of humankind—has, since the very beginning of Chris-

Introduction 11

tianity and most acutely since the Reformation, been countered and contested by those whose steadfast commitment to logos, an unwavering belief in the unassailability of divine authority and traditional Christian dogma, have made them resistant to any sign of humanism or “secular” drift. So it is, Kloppenberg writes, that “recurrent battles over theology, metaphysics, ethics, and political theory” both within and beyond church walls have constituted “a continuing struggle to understand and live up to the ideals of what we now call the Judeo-Christian tradition.” “The history of democracy” itself, he adds, “is a series of culture wars between the living spirit of caritas and its degradation and deformation into absolute dogmas of various kinds.” Those who believe that such deeply rooted culture wars can end, he concludes, are trapped in wishful thinking; such “crosscutting pressures” have always been present in all religious traditions, and their persistence and the intensity with which they divide communities of faith “is a perennial feature of our history unlikely to end any time soon.” A sobering thought, and one that Kloppenberg offers with sad acknowledgment that in our current political state, such crosscutting pressures and warring will not simply persist but likely continue to escalate, with tragic outcomes for American faith and democracy. Only a renewed embrace of caritas and its core virtues by citizens of all religious (and nonreligious) persuasion, he suggests, will quell the storm. By tracing the long history of battle within and beyond church circles, Kloppenberg thus highlights the “tantalizingly ambiguous” title of this volume. As underscored throughout this brief introduction, the authors represented here are hardly trapped in wishful thinking that the culture wars can or will go away; nor do they (other than Kloppenberg, that is) offer any advice as to how our society might escape its current plight. Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars is, rather, an attempt to reveal, map out, and account for the dynamic pluralism of religious belief, practice, and politics that has long operated beyond and in between the rigid binaries we typically associate with our current moment. To be sure, the essays included here are but a snapshot of the full diversity and dynamism of faith and politics in modern America; a more thorough accounting needs to include the beliefs, practices, and politics of people whose faith commitments are not so heavily tethered to Western Christianity and whose religious identities are shaped by membership in

12 Introduction

other global faith communities, be it Islam or Buddhism, for instance. Still, the hope is that this volume will encourage readers to think anew about the complexities and contingencies of modern U.S. religion and politics and shine fresh light on oft-forgotten or overlooked issues, interests, and convictions that have driven people of faith to action in a lively and combative public sphere. If there is a prescriptive aim to this volume, it is simply to show that an escape from today’s heated moral combat, if any exists, will be realized only after scholars and citizens ­grapple with the full range of faith’s hold on this country.

Notes 1.  Pat Buchanan, Address to the Republican National Convention, August 17, 1992, available at http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture -war-speech-speech-text/, last accessed February 22, 2017. 2.  James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 3.  Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 4.  Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 5.  John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 6.  On the “evangelical age” and long history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism, see key representative works such as Steven Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evan­ gelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the finer theological and political divisions within evangelicalism, see, for instance, Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Represen­ tations of the new history of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism include ­Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton,

Introduction 13 NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) and After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 7.  See, for instance, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020); Gerardo Marti, American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); and Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020). 8.  Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004): 1357– 1378. 9.  Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).

PA RT I

Sp irit s o f Ref or m

CHAPTER 1

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers? Fights for Headship in Church-Labor Solidarity, 1912–1919 Ja n i n e G i o r d a n o D r a k e ★

In March and April 1914, Frank Tannenbaum, a twenty-one-year-old busboy in New York City, organized a massive break-in on a string of churches of New York. One after the other, he and fellow members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) entered sanctuaries and demanded food and shelter. Some ministers, like Father Schneider at St. Alphonsus, called the police and had the men arrested. Tannenbaum told the New York Call, “Do you call that the spirit of Christ, to turn hungry and homeless men away?” Most ministers offered food and shelter but did their best to quickly dismiss the “unwashed” men. Newspapers and religious publications around the country referred to these break-ins as “invasions.”1 Yet, that very March, barely two hundred miles away, Boston members of the IWW began a very different dialogue with church leaders. Methodist minister Harry Ward presented a series of lectures on syndicalism and socialism at Ford Hall Forum, a speaker series hosted by the Boston University School of Theology. The talks were widely attended, and the IWW Propaganda League of Boston raved at the “unbiased, ­unprejudiced and able manner in which he presented the controversy between capital and labor and its causes.” At the end of the talk, Ward 17

18  Janine Giordano Drake

handed over the podium to IWW members, begging them to address the audience of ministers, reformers, and employers with their suggestions for next steps. One of their requests was that Ward publish and circulate his talks on socialism, syndicalism, and the labor movement. Ward did so, and he used the IWW’s endorsement as prefatory material for his book.2 We can only understand the history of March 1914 by taking these stories together, for the 1910s are littered with simultaneously friendly and combative relationships between church leaders and wage earners. Both to make friends and stir a fight, oftentimes in the same evening, rank-and-file working people showed up in large numbers at lectures of traveling clergy. Sometimes, as in Boston’s Open Forum and New York’s Labor Temple, divinity schools and denominations sponsored the events.3 On other occasions, labor unions hosted clergy, both to give talks and to write columns in their newspapers. As the product of organized labor’s hard work, several professors of theology became convinced that Jesus did reject the tenets of capitalism, that the labor movement was part of God’s plan for social salvation and the redeemed Kingdom of God, and that capitalism was inherently abusive. The American Federation of Labor, a confederation of labor unions, exchanged conference delegates with the Federal Council of Churches and distributed tracts on the Christian value of trade unions. The Federal Council orchestrated re­ vivals that encouraged workingmen to join both churches and trade unions. Ministers investigated strikes and reported upon them in deeply sympathetic terms, even as they shied from defending them. As Ken Fones-Wolf has shown, organized labor maintained such partnerships to prove to Christian workers that their unions were not antithetical to  Christianity.4 But what kept Social Gospel clergy interested in workers? This chapter examines the Progressive Era relationship between laborers and clergy as a competition over who should direct the spiritual lives of workers and who should lead the cause for justice within the Christian nation. In 1914, at a summit on the role of Christianity in ­industrial reform, anarcho-syndicalist Arturo Giovannitti challenged left-leaning Christians to choose their allies carefully. A former minister, he said that Christ called Christian workers themselves to lead in the

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  19

holy revolution. Orthodox Protestant clergy soundly rejected any suggestion that working people did not need church. Moreover, they i­ nsisted that Jesus never called for revolution. Both church and labor authorities agreed that industrial relations needed to be redeemed and reconstructed. Yet, as this chapter illustrates, the churches and the labor ­movement fought over who ought to lead that movement and what that “Christian America” ought to look like. Ward was probably the most left-leaning and most requested speaker among all ministers who spoke to workers about Christianity and labor. In 1912 he addressed audiences in 17 states, including 347 special forums and 36 conferences. This included twelve colleges, three normal schools, three theological schools, and a number of high schools. He likely also spoke within the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a national shopfloor revival co-coordinated with the YMCA and the American Federation of Labor.5 Newspapers called Ward the evangelist for the Social Gospel, for the emphasis of his talks always pinpointed the source of ­social problems in the unwillingness of Christians to follow the divine moral order.6 He told audiences of mixed background that it was their Christian responsibility to promote the flourishing of all people; they should “make possible to every individual free access to all that is best in life.”7 Insisting that the churches were firmly committed to the industrial reconstruction, the British immigrant pastor argued that the profit system was out of alignment with the hope of a Christian civilization. He often invited union leaders to join him on forum platforms.8 Ward’s speeches often sounded like those of Christian Socialists of the previous thirty years, for he combined assaults on religion and capitalism. He affirmed Christian Socialists’ claims that capitalism operates around the production of “things and trusts that somehow the Kingdom may be added. It would use the life energy of women and children to the point of exhaustion, and then let the wearied remnant make for the higher life as it can.” He echoed their ideas that the “wealth-making ­process” was essentially a religious concern and, in this respect, preached to socialists that Christianity was on their side. As Ward repeated frequently, to deprive some of a living wage impeded on the proper practice of Christianity in the United States.9 He believed that workers should be paid more, even if it came at the expense of businesses. He accused

20  Janine Giordano Drake

modern industrial capitalism of being “unregenerate” because it used people, especially women and children, as tools in the production of ­material goods. He affirmed socialists’ contention that there was more than enough wealth available for all to live comfortably; if only wealth was more equitably redistributed, humanity would advance and a more noble civilization be established.10 At times, he even applauded Jesus’s confrontational approach to the “authorities of his day,” as they were characterized by “revolutionary boldness and thoroughness.” In Denver, soon after the Ludlow massacre, he implicitly endorsed a boycott, arguing, “The time has come for the people to refuse to take the products of industry at the cost of life of the working class.”11 Between 1912 and 1917, Ward distributed fifteen thousand copies of his book The Social Creed of the Churches, a Federal Council–endorsed declaration the human “rights” of all workingmen to a host of industrial reforms. These included a “living wage,” old-age insurance, a reduction in work hours, safe working conditions, the end to child labor, a weekly day off, “the application of Christian principles to the acquisition and use of property, and for the most equitable division of the product of in­dustry that can be ultimately devised.”12 Ward frequently received notes of appreciation from other Methodist pastors on the ways that his work was increasing church attendance. Ward kept notes from those who praised Social Creed. One minister in a mill town of Massachusetts requested more, “both in English and Italian.”13 Another, from a steel town in Ohio, asked the same. He added that his initial canvass of the work “secured us many new S.S. [Sunday school] attendants.”14 Florence Simms, executive secretary of the YWCA and member of the FCC Committee on Social Service, worked closely with the YWCA to be sure it was shared with working women. Social Creed did call for limitations on women’s hours and extra provisions for their safety.15 The book was translated into several immigrant languages and often distributed with invitations to area churches and their array of ministries. These often included language schools, social events such as moving pictures, church nurseries, and—of course—services.16 Both the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops praised Ward for Social Creed.17 However, while Ward’s sympathies with socialism were sincere, his deepest loyalties were to the institutional church. In 1912 he hoped that

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  21

the Church, in its universal sense, would be the newest social movement, and that middle-class and working-class people together would topple social and political authorities. To the extent he was a Christian Socialist, he was so in the pre-1886, “Great Upheaval” sense. Born in London in 1873 and steeped in the traditions of Social Christianity through Fabian reformers, Ward’s understanding of the gospel implied the need to transform culture. He understood the golden rule as key to the practice of the faith, but he saw true transformation in industrial relationships as im­ possible without the Holy Spirit. Ward wanted industry to be “responsible to a higher law” and thus answerable not to workers but to God for its actions.18 He was profoundly skeptical of any social movements that were not church-related, especially those he saw as competing with churches for the responsibility of spiritual and moral leaders within poor, working-class communities. Put another way, Ward soundly rejected nondenominational People’s Churches, barn revivals, and parachurch ministries such as the Christian Socialist Fellowship as churches. He agreed with many of their ideas but dismissed the notion that Christian wage earners should reconstruct industrial relations without reestablishing the authority of the church to regulate the excesses of industry. While he dedicated the prime of his life to dialoging with wage earners and emphasizing the concept of social salvation, he earnestly encouraged those workers to work within a Federal Council–affiliated church. His clipping files brim with testimonials of workers who were so touched by his talks on the labor movement that they decided to join a church.19 Ward positioned himself and his clerical colleagues as emissaries, or missionaries, of the Church to the people. He saw the Social Gospel movement as “the product of the modern missionary awakening.”20 A British-born Victorian, Ward accepted the colonial framework of a missionary dispensing truth to a “mission field.”21 He did not condescend to workers, and he made it his business to understand and relay all the debates among different types of unions, socialist strategies, and methods by which to compel the action of employers. But he did not believe any labor strategy would have lasting value without working with and through the churches. Similar to Father John Ryan, Ward and the Federal Council believed that the only way to truly transform industrial relationships was to change the way business leaders and workers talked about “good” business.

22  Janine Giordano Drake

The hope of clergy to become both spiritual directors and lobbyists for the labor movement was expressed through their major investment in strike reporting. The Federal Council and its affiliates investigated the 1910–1911 Bethlehem Steel strike, the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, the 1911–1912 Muscatine button workers’ strike, the 1913 Paterson (New Jersey) silk strike, and the experience of coal miners (especially in Colorado, West Virginia, and Michigan) in 1913 and 1914. In fact, it was Federal Council executive Henry Atkinson’s report on coal miners’ conditions behind the Ludlow massacre that socialist Upton Sinclair used in his ­research for King Coal.22 The reports consistently illustrated the danger of working conditions and the very low wages of workers in relation to their cost of living. Yet, in every one of these cases, pastors’ strike investigations came too late to be helpful at the bargaining table. While strike reports functioned to keep a national spotlight on particular kinds of workers for a middle-class reading audience, the Federal Council was careful not to validate unions as independent, Christian vehicles of justice. Consistently, reports emphasized the need for “neutral” church leadership to intervene in the interest of justice. Strikers usually accepted such solidarity gestures carefully. After all, the Federal Council had assiduously assembled mailing lists for churches in nearly every town in the United States. To take one example, the 1910 Bethlehem Steel strike illustrates Protestant ministers’ self-interested alliance with labor, as well as labor’s half-hearted cooperation. Overworked steel workers in Bethlehem, Penn­sylvania, disputed wages, the speed-up, and the length of the workday, but they began the strike by protesting Sunday work, for Social Creed had explicitly mentioned the value of a weekly day off. Yet, the Federal Council’s local affiliate, the Bethlehem Ministers’ Association, only very vaguely adhered to the creed. Its members called a meeting between labor and capital that ended in no agreement and then chided workers for asking for too much. As they put it, “Is it reasonable to expect that by attacking your employer openly and in secret, by trying to destroy his property and his business, you can best persuade him to deal generously and magnanimously with you?”23 Unionists, in turn, condemned Social Creed as a farce. The Federal Council’s national headquarters called for a report on the strike conditions, but it was not available until a year later.

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  23

A national executive committee also issued a formal apology to the workers, holding that the ministers association was “sincerely desirous to serve the interest of the workmen, . . . [but] too far aloof from the workingman to understand him and win his confidence.” Yet, Jacob Talezaar, general organizer for the American Federation of Labor, announced, “The Church, nearly as a whole, the Protestant as well as Catholic Church, gave no aid to the men who were fighting for a great moral issue.”24 Talezaar used the Social Creed for publicity but let workers know that the ministers were not trustworthy. The Federal Council’s report did not consider strikers any more trustworthy, for it did not support the strikers, as strikers, any more than the ministers’ association had. Instead, the report highlighted the need for clerical participation in labor relations arbitration. The report held, “When, on February 4, 1910, three machinists in the Bethlehem Steel Works were discharged for daring to protest on behalf of their fellows against Sunday labor, thus precipitating one of the most notable strikes in this country, they not only raised issues which concern the 9,000 men employed in the steel works, but brought to the attention of the American public certain industrial problems which cannot be settled by capital and labor alone. The American people must assume a distinct share in the responsibility of their solution.” Strikers were depicted as noble simpletons, and the strike was constructed as insufficient as a moral action because it posited one selfish group against another. The report consistently nominated churches as the “ethical forces of the community” best suited to advocate for workers’ real needs and added that churches could provide “opportunities for clean recreation.”25 Bethlehem ministers used the report to feign support for laborers, but that purported support in fact invalidated unions, and strikes, as moral actions. Ultimately, the Federal Council demanded the independent, Christian authority on matters of labor that the labor movement had demanded for years. In the early 1910s, however, union and socialist movements usually prioritized winning strikes and positive publicity even higher than they did winning this war with church leaders. Organized labor benefited from Social Gospel support for two major reasons. First, in a time when the most anti-socialist attacks stemmed from church officials, especially Catholics, socialists could emphasize the fact that those Christian clerics

24  Janine Giordano Drake

who were not otherwise “muzzled” affirmed their cause.26 Rufus Weeks, editor for the Christian Socialist Fellowship’s newspaper, spoke for many socialists when he said that he supported all ministers’ efforts to challenge the abuse of workers. As he put it, “We should make it perfectly plain that religiously we are with the churches, and politically with the actually militant Socialists.”27 N. D. Cochran, editor of the socialist Chicago Day Book, reported with approval in July 1914, “Organized Religion has rallied to the support of organized labor!” Mill owners, who used to rely upon churches’ negative publicity as veritable strikebreakers, were now embarrassed to abuse workers.28 Frederick Guy Strickland, editor of the Miami Valley Socialist in Dayton, Ohio, affirmed that whenever capitalism was called into moral and ethical question, the destructive power of Mammon was under fire.29 His paper frequently dared clergy to act not as “cowards” but as “good shepherds.” One writer entreated clergy, “Stand by the truth, and your flock will stand by you when the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing.” So-called Christian capitalists, of course, were wolves.30 Second, many socialist editors understood socialism as a “new spiritual awakening” and the basis for an antidenominational, alternate Christian church.31 “I believe [socialism] is in the hearts of the plain people today,” Cochran said, “even though you can’t find it in some of the pulpits.”32 In a piece called “More Christianity Practiced by Labor Unions Than All the Churches,” his paper quoted Mother Jones’s praise for unions as the truest representatives of Christ. Unions, not churches, she said, find “the funds to provide shoes for children.”33 Cochran emphasized unions as a spiritual alliance. He published one reader’s letter stating, “The rank and file of men and women have an inherent feeling of respect for ‘The God of our Fathers,’ but when organized religion, in the form of various churches cease[s] to serve the people . . . it is sowing seeds for a sure crop of atheism.” In that high noon of impromptu “church,” traveling revivalists, and “church” services within barns, tents, and union meetings, many workers believed that the “Church” of the new century did not need to look like it did in the past. Through work actions, Christian workers could lead in both spiritual and political renewal. Arturo Giovannitti, the Italian-born anarcho-syndicalist, sought to do just this. He was recruited by IWW leaders in 1911 to build the syn-

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  25

dicalist socialist platform on the strengths of nondenominational Christianity in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Born and raised Protestant in Italy, he attended seminary in Canada before coming to Union Theological Seminary in New York. He worked with Presbyterian missions in Montreal, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh as a younger man. Then, in the early 1900s, Giovannitti “converted” to syndicalism, the conviction that factories should be owned and managed by the workers whose labor paid for their existence. He would tell workers that he didn’t lose his faith but gained a greater understanding of what justice looked like.34 When the handsome twenty-nine-year-old first arrived in Lawrence in 1911, his charge from IWW leaders was to transform the strike into a referendum on the beatitudes, a highlight of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Most clergy in Lawrence, particularly Catholic priests, opposed the radical union. But the IWW wanted to push clergy to choose sides. Giovan­nitti’s religious language succeeded in winning the attention, and even support, of a large number of clerics and social reformers. Yet, directly countering the Federal Council, Giovannitti emphasized the necessity of workers to lead in whatever coalition they might build with churches. As soon as Giovannitti arrived, the young poet addressed the immigrant workers on the Boston Common as radical in the tradition of the Jesus celebrated in labor churches, People’s Churches, and the socialist press. He echoed the beatitudes, Blessed are the rebels, for they shall reconquer the earth There is no destiny that the will of man cannot break; There are no chains of iron that the other cannot destroy; There is nothing that the power of your arms, lighted by the power of your mind, cannot transform and recast and remake. Arise, then, ye men of the plough and the hammer, the helm and the lever, and send forth to the four winds of the earth your new proclamation of freedom which shall be the last and shall abide forevermore.35 The Atlantic Monthly reported that he “preached with missionary intensity the doctrine of Syndicalism.”36 He also pledged the tactic of nonviolence.

26  Janine Giordano Drake

The Citizens Association of Lawrence, a group of leading businessmen, interpreted this profession of faith—combined with industrial unionism—as a declaration of war upon Christian, American ideals. Police, strikebreakers, and the state militia occupied Lawrence and jailed strikers for the crime of disturbing the peace.37 Yet, twenty-three thousand workers continued the strike. One striker, Anna LoPezzi, was shot by police in a conflict blamed upon the strikers. Despite the accepted fact that neither the strike organizers, nor Giovannitti, nor union organizer Joseph Ettor were present at the murder, they were charged not as perpetrators but as “accessories” to the “unlawful violence and riot” and jailed without bail from January 1911 until the following November.38 Still, the IWW had won the trust of the people of Lawrence. Without wasting time, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Haywood took over strike leadership and continued to construct workers as tortured Christian martyrs.39 When violence escalated, children were put on trains to wait out the strike with sympathetic families outside of Lawrence. Strikers staged parades and pageants with the IWW flag and songs from the IWW’s Big Red Songbook, including parodies of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.” The Citizens Association sponsored counterparades with the slogan “For God and Country! The Stars and Stripes Forever. The Red Flag Never.” Anglo-Protestant members of Lawrence tried to pressure Italian American strikers into breaking with the “foreign” politics and proving their Christianity and Americanness. Their patriotic parade featured a man dressed as Uncle Sam and women dressed as the Statue of Liberty.40 When, in September, Lawrence workers finally won the strike, Giovannitti and Ettor still had not had their trial. While in jail, the labor organizers had not wasted time. Giovannitti translated Émile Pouget’s Sabotage into English, adding a foreword on his experience with the law in Lawrence. A flashy dresser and poet of the Lyrical Left, Giovannitti would represent the radical labor movement as the herald of a more Christian civilization.41 He even latched onto the growing tide of dispensationalism within the high church debates. He said on the stand in 1912, It may be that we are dreamers, it may be that we are fanatics . . . but yet so was a fanatic Socrates, who instead of acknowledging the phi-

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  27

losophy of the aristocrats of Athens preferred to drink the poison. And so was a fanatic the Savior Jesus Christ, who instead of acknowledging his submission to all the rulers of the times and all the priestcraft of the time, preferred the cross between two thieves. . . . We have been working in something that is dearer to us than our lives and our liberty; we have been working in what are our ideas, our ideals, our aspirations, our hopes—you may say our religion. . . . We are now the heralds of a new civilization; we have come here to ­proclaim a new truth; we are the apostles of a new evangel, a new gospel.42 Giovannitti hoped that Protestants and Catholics in Massachusetts would consider the syndicalist movement as the abrupt and sudden social change for the Kingdom of God they awaited. In a final statement, he moved the jury to tears with the suggestion that if he must be put to death (like the Haymarket martyrs of a generation earlier), he would willingly embrace the opportunity to move the world closer to the truth. History, he argued, “shall have the last word to us.”43 The agitators were acquitted within two weeks. Yet, through the show of the trial, the IWW won the endorsement that they sought of many middle-class Christian reformers. “Why should Giovannitti, once a student at Union Theological Seminary and superintendent of the Methodist mission, be lost to the church?” wrote an editor for The Continent. Overlooking Giovannitti’s support for the tactic of sabotage and his personal rejection of Jesus as Messiah, the editor continued, “The man’s basic beliefs are only Christian altruism—he learned his passion for humanity in the church at the feet of the best men’s Brother.” The writer continued, “Why were his excess of ardor and immaturity of judgment allowed to force him outside the pale of organized Christianity? The man is a born dreamer and devotee, and a leader of men. He only needed ripening to be a great minister.”44 In that high noon of challenges on biblical orthodoxy among Ivy Leaguers, liberal Protestants raised few quibbles about the fact that Giovannitti was no longer an orthodox believer.45 A. J. Muste, graduate of Union Theological Seminary and minister at the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in New York City, praised Giovannitti: “It is of peculiar interest to one

28  Janine Giordano Drake

who is himself a graduate of a Protestant theological seminary, and who is having his own struggle trying to make what he learned there fit within the new scientific thought and social ideals, to learn that Giovannitti himself once began preparations for the Protestant ministry.”46 When Harry Emerson Fosdick publicly supported Giovannitti and the IWW, the IWW republished his commentary.47 Yet, the more middle-class churchgoers supported labor radicals like Giovannitti, the more defensive church leaders would become of their leadership within the developing labor-church alliance. By 1913 the Socialist Party of America had swelled its ranks with the addition of almost a dozen new ethnic branches. Finnish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Scandinavian, South Slav, German, Slovak, and Polish speakers each had their own newspapers, meetings, and locals. The IWW also welcomed these immigrant and ethnic socialists. Though many foreign-­born socialists saw themselves as Christ-following, white Anglo-­ Protestant wage earners were quickly becoming a minority within both radical groups. Moreover, socialists were growing very quickly in popularity; that year, thirty-one socialists sat in thirteen state legislatures, and more served as mayors of major cities. Two socialists sat in the House of Representatives.48 Federal Council ministers, particularly Charles Stelzle and Charles Macfarland feared the labor movement would become less reverent of orthodox ministers as it became more strongly organized. In 1913 the ­executive committee made the decision to invite Ettor and Giovannitti to the Sagamore Conference, the largest North American conference of  Christian social reformers. The previous Sagamore had agreed to ­“rejoic[e] at the signs of the times and the ever-multiplying evidences of the progress of the kingdom of God and the principles of fundamental democracy.” They had agreed to a statement that “social salvation” would be achieved by “cooperation” and the “realization . . . all have the same exalted aim, differing as they may in the matter of ways and methods; namely, the complete emancipation of the individual man and the brotherly union of the entire race.”49 They had not agreed on who would lead this movement for cooperation and who would follow. Yearly, the most politically forward-thinking, as well as left-­leaning, men and women who worked in settlement houses, church missions, and university extensions flocked to the event. Fliers advertised that this

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  29

meeting would be particularly important, for it would feature a debate between Giovannitti and “a Christian capitalist” over the righteousness of capitalism. The conference’s platform committee, which included Wisconsin economist Richard Ely, as well as several lesser-known so­ ciologists, economists, and social workers, announced that their syndicalist guests should not be harassed in any way.50 In positioning Giovannitti within a spectrum of Christian radicals, capitalists, and unionists, the Sagamore Conference served as a referendum on the competition between the churches and unions for leadership in the new social crusade. Stelzle and Macfarland had a predictable platform position. Stelzle issued an extended statement that “Churches,” described in that capitalized sense of universality, should lead the nation toward industrial democracy. Institutional churches, such as his New York City Labor Temple, would grow in the multiplicity of their ministries for working men. They would become more charitable, influential, and useful to workers. They would make room for union meetings and women’s social work ministries, and come to play a significant role in all workers’ public and private lives. Stelzle exhorted his audience that socialists were growing out of control. “About three or four years ago,” he said, “socialists only had about one seventh of the delegates” to the American Federation of Labor’s convention. “At the last convention they represented fully one third.” Stelzle hoped to “wipe out conditions which give rise to socialism” by supporting trade unions’ attempts at granting skilled workers higher wages and improved working conditions.51 Essentially, Stelzle reiterated the Federal Council’s agenda: the hope to swell the number of wage earners in Protestant churches while they supported better working conditions. Yet the Federal Council recognized that they were relative newcomers to the movement for Christian social reform. Ely and most of the Christian reformers at the conference had spent decades supporting ­socialists, populists, and unionists in their struggle with conservative churches. Moreover, many seasoned social reformers believed in the possibility of what they called a “national religion,” a civil religion that would bind Americans together in a common morality and which would minimize theological and doctrinal distinctions. As Charles Zeublin announced at the beginning of the conference, “The common morality of our common life promises to be a religious solvent.”52 To Zeublin,

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every person could have their own “creed,” but Americans needed a ­common faith in “cooperation” that would serve to bind them together outside of divisive religious debates.53 While the Federal Council would later be accused of theological liberalism, its members were among the most r­ eligiously conservative at the conference. Having recently finished the Men and Religion Forward Movement, they wanted to convince the large number of socialist Christians and Christian Socialists in at­ tendance that the “national religion” ought to be a politically neutral Protestantism. In the battle between the Federal Council and Giovannitti, however, there was no clear winner. Giovannitti’s ability to capture the attention of both his audience and the media through his Sagamore presence provides a window into the vast approval for a Christian-inspired, worker-­ led platform within the labor movement. The young labor leader’s keynote speech, “The Constructive Side of Syndicalism,” both Christened syndicalism and defended the importance of laborers speaking for themselves. He explained that syndicalism was about worker-led reclamation of industrial capital and thus a rejection of compromise in the search for justice. “Ours is not a gospel of pacification,” nor one of ­“harmony and brotherly love. So far as the economic conditions are concerned, ours is a struggle for the mastership and rulership of the earth.” In case his message was unclear, Giovannitti explicitly rejected Federal Council investigations and arbitrations of industrial disputes and their accompanying messages, which entrusted business leaders to simply agree to pay workers more. “Who is going to say what is a fair share for the laborer?” he queried, “Who is going to say what is a fair share for the capitalist? Who is going to say how many hours one should work and the other should sleep? We must have a neutral judge, an absolutely impartial judge.” As he emphasized, capitalism does not make room for churches to be neutral. The only way to achieve the Kingdom of God, he claimed, was by enabling the poor to manage their own social and economic futures.54 He opposed efforts that relied upon the state to “dispense welfare to every member of the community by keeping them in subjection and slavery.” In a syndicalist society, all people would, a priori, function as a unit of a larger whole.55 The labor leader thus struck an uncommon chord of

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  31

consensus within a union nearly torn apart by debates over the justice of sabotage as a defensive mechanism.56 A. J. Portenar, labor leader and syndicalist in the printing trades, followed Giovannitti’s address with ­another long critique of parliamentary socialism entitled “Perversion of an Ideal.” He said that syndicalists rejected the sluggishness of parliamentary methods but did not desire sabotage. The general strike was the only and most just way of achieving justice. To the quibble that such ideas were merely utopian, Portenar countered, “All that has been said of the IWW and of syndicalism has been said of trades unions in days gone by.”57 That summer day, Giovannitti won wide support for the Christian value of worker-led movements. Settlement house manager William Ewing, superintendent of the Wells Memorial Institute in Boston affirmed, “Mr. Giovannitti has said that only three or four persons in this audience would be in sympathy with him. I think he has found that a mistake. I think the audience is in deep sympathy with every man who is endeavoring to improve the position of people who are in such hard conditions as those for whom he is working.” He strongly affirmed the anti-­sabotage elements of the IWW, as he averred that violence was not warranted until all other methods of change were exhausted. But he and his colleagues agreed with Giovannitti and the IWW “in all places except where it differs from socialism.”58 Giovannitti’s radicalism had made socialist redistribution of the profits of industry seem both moderate and Christian. On the eve of World War I, most Christian reformers and their middle-class supporters still sympathized with Christian socialists and other radicals and recognized the importance of workers’ struggles to attain better wages and working conditions. It was not until U.S. intervention in the Great War that this relationship broke. To the extent that Woodrow Wilson’s war forced Progressives to choose between the president and radical labor, the Federal Council unapologetically defended the president and a statist liberalism that made little room for labor’s leadership. When, in 1917, Ward distributed ten thousand free copies of The Gospel for a Working World to IWW members in Seattle, the book identified syndicalism as violent and characterized by “bitter hostility.” Ward now rejected the idea that Christianity was “revolutionary” in any militant sense. Referencing the more spiritually

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interested Walter Rauschenbusch, Ward said what would bring lasting change in industry was the “complete transformation of the whole of human life, individual and social.” Conflating the IWW’s controversial tactic of sabotage with the entire labor movement, he preached, “With the evil that is in the world there can be no truce or compromise. There is no other propaganda for social reconstruction which goes so far or ­demands such thoroughgoing change as the propaganda of Jesus.”59 Though the Federal Council issued a sympathetic investigation of the conditions leading to the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the liberal pastors persistently minimized the Christian motivations behind many strikers.60 In fact, the Federal Council used their “investigative” presence to accept Rockefeller funds for a major revival campaign during the strike, the Interchurch World Movement. While the report defended the strike after the fact, its accompanying revival spent over one million dollars for the primary purpose of increasing church membership.61 When we examine the early history of the Federal Council from the perspective of organized Christian workers, Ward’s Social Creed appears evasive of the highest priorities of the labor movement. Organized workers demanded not just a vague pledge of support for better wages and working conditions, but the freedoms of speech and assembly, the right to strike, the right to unionize, and the right to share in the profits of industry. Above all, they built relationships with clergy to register themselves as fellow Christian leaders. Rarely did labor leaders seek outside “Christian” arbitrators or lobbyists to ratify their demands; they wanted to use the strike as a moral action, and they wanted employers to greet them at the negotiating table as fellow Christian men. Still, most accounts of the Social Gospel start with the biographies and ambitions of these ministers. When we naturalize the Federal Council’s leadership, we endorse their expensive and prolonged battle to reestablish Protestant hegemony in the mill towns, mining towns, and crowded, immigrant-run, urban centers of industrial America. We assume that churches and church leaders were the authorities they claimed to be on social and economic justice, and we trivialize the religious convictions of wage earners who supported different “Christian” solutions to the problems of industrial America. Part and parcel of Anglo-­Protestants’ “moral reconstruction” was their effort to render invisible, or irrelevant, the presence of thoughtful, Christian wage earners and to portray them-

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  33

selves as the most appropriate moral leaders of the modern nation. In fact, we might read the National Labor Relations Act (1935) as a belated victory in the labor movement’s concerted campaign to establish that union members were just as capable as clerical arbitrators in steering the nation toward Christian justice. Notes 1.  New York Call, March 5, 1914, quoted in Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 4:444– 45; “Religion and Social Service,” Literary Digest 48 (April 4, 1914). 2.  Harry Ward, The Labor Movement, from the Standpoint of Religious Values (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1917), ix. 3.  George Coleman, The Story of Ford Hall and the Open Forum Movement: A Symposium (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917); Labor Temple Bulletin, January 13, 1912), RG 14, box 1, folder 2, Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS). 4.  Ken Fones-Wolf, Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 5.  Harry Ward, A Year Book of the Church and Social Service (New York: Fleming Revell, 1914), 46. 6.  David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 76. 7.  Harry Ward, Social Creed of the Churches (New York: Abingdon Press, 1914), 15. 8.  Eugene Link, Labor-Religion Prophet: The Times and Life of Harry Ward (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 58. 9.  Ibid., 177. 10.  Ibid., 192. 11.  Frances Wayne, “Christianity Such as Christ Taught before Theologians Muddled, Need,” Denver Post, March 19, 1913, Methodist Federation for Social Action Clippings (MFSA); Samuel Zane Batten, The Social Task of Christianity (New York: Fleming Revell, 1911), 77. 12. Duke, In the Trenches, 81; Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 50; Ward, Social Creed, 7. 13.  Letter from W. F. Whitney to Harry Ward, September 22, 1914, box 11, folder 4, MFSA. 14.  W. H. Spybey (Ripley, Ohio) to Ward, March 19, 1914, box 11, folder 4, MFSA. 15.  Florence Simms, “The Industrial Policies of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September 1922): 138–40.

34  Janine Giordano Drake 16.  Minutes of Meeting of Committee of Direction, January 25, 1918, Committee on Christ and Social Service, box 88, folder 1, Henry Churchill King ­Papers (HCK). 17. Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 50. 18.  Ibid., 38. 19.  For example, “Social Service Campaign in Troy Conference,” New York Christian Advocate, October 30, 1913, MFSA; Batten, The Social Task of Christianity, 80. 20. Ward, A Year Book, 15, 47. 21. Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 50. 22.  Upton Sinclair, King Coal (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 385; “Agent for Churches Assails Mine Heads,” New York Times, November 24, 1914; Charles ­Stelzle, “King Coal,” World Outlook, January 20, 1920, 27–33. 23.  Bethlehem Ministers’ Association, South Bethlehem Globe, April 20, 1910; Report of the Special Committee of Investigation (New York: Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, 1910), 10–11, RG 18, box 53, folder 8, PHS. 24.  See, e.g., Robert Hessen, “The Bethlehem Steel Strike of 1910,” Labor History 15, no. 1 (1974): 3–18; Charles Stelzle, Son of the Bowery (New York: George Doran, 1926), 161–66. 25.  Report of the Special Committee of Investigation, 10–11, 15–25, emphasis added. 26.  N. D. Cochran, “Why Rich and Poor Can’t Always Worship God in the Same Way,” Day Book, May 26, 1914. 27.  The Christian Socialist ( July 15, 1905); as quoted in Robert Handy, “Christianity and Socialism in America,” Church History 21, no. 1 (March 1952), 43; Paul Laubenstein, “A History of Christian Socialism in America” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1925), 55. 28.  “Bibles Replace Bullets: Churches Battle for Enslaved Children,” Day Book, July 11, 1914; N. D. Cochran, “Is the Church the Best and Truest Friend Labor Ever Had?” Day Book, September 5, 1913. See also “Senator Urges Church to Meet Socialist Challenge,” The American Socialist, July 18, 1914. 29.  Frederick Guy Strickland, “Working Class Ethics,” Miami Valley Socialist, February 23, 1912; Herman Stern, A Socialist Catechism (Berkeley, CA: Courier, 1912), 16. 30.  Thomas Harnish, “A Call to the Preachers: Where Art Thou?” Miami Valley Socialist, April 29, 1913. 31.  Frederick Guy Strickland, “A New Spiritual Awakening,” Miami Valley Socialist, March 22, 1912. 32.  N. D. Cochran, “The Reason for the Desperate Fight against a Mini­ mum Wage for Women,” Day Book, January 15, 1914. 33.  Jane Whitaker, “More Christianity Practiced by Labor Unions Than All the Churches,” Day Book, December 1, 1913; Letter from Mother Jones to Fred Warren, April 27, 1913, Haldeman Manuscripts I, Lilly Library.

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?  35 34.  Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 218; “The Wayfarer,” The Continent, July 31, 1913, 1055; “The Social Significance of Arturo Giovannitti,” Current Opinion ( January 1913): 24. 35. Watson, Bread and Roses, 218; Arturo Giovannitti, Collected Poems (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 193, 197–98. 36.  “The Poetry of Syndicalism,” The Forum (October 1914): 853, as quoted in Kerri Harney, “Bread and Roses in United States History: The Power of Constructed Memory” (honors thesis, SUNY Binghamton, 1999). 37. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:329. 38.  Melvyn Dubofsky, They Shall Be All (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 248; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:337. [Watson says Lopizzo (218); Foner says LoPezzo (336)]. 39. Dubofsky, They Shall Be All, 249. 40. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:332–33; Watson, Bread and Roses, 228. 41.  Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 162. 42.  Peter Ciano, “The Moral Imprint of Early Twentieth Century Italian-­ American Radical Labor,” Proteus (1990): 27. 43. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:346; Current Opinion 54 ( January 1913): 24. 44.  “The Wayfarer,” The Continent, July 31, 1913, 1055. 45.  “Arturo Giovannitti,” The Survey, November 2, 1912, 163–66. 46.  A. J. Muste, The Survey, November 30, 1912, 264. 47.  Fred Thompson, The IWW: Its First Fifty Years (Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1955), 58. 48.  Bernard Johnpoll and Lillian Johnpoll, The Impossible Dream (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1981), 273. 49.  Ibid., 84. 50.  Sagamore Sociological Conference, Proceedings of the Sagamore Sociological Conference, Sagamore Beach, Massachusetts, June 26–28, 1912, 83. 51.  Sagamore Sociological Conference, Proceedings of the Sagamore Sociological Conference, 1913, 48. 52.  Sagamore Sociological Conference, Proceedings, 1912, 6. 53.  Sagamore Sociological Conference, Proceedings, 1913, 5, 9. 54.  Ibid., 38. 55.  Ibid., 42. 56.  On debates over sabotage, see David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 70–78. 57.  Sagamore Sociological Conference, Proceedings, 1913, 43, 47. 58. Ibid., 47.

36  Janine Giordano Drake 59.  Harry Ward, The Gospel for a Working World (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1918), 148–49. 60.  Interchurch World Movement of North America Commission of Inquiry, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, vol 2. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 246–50. 61.  Charles Harvey, “John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919–1920: A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement,” Church History 51, no. 2 ( June 1982): 198–209; Janine Giordano Drake, “Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2014), 281–333.

CHAPTER 2

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s Joseph Kip Kosek ★

The crisis of capitalism dominates histories of America in the 1930s. That story, according to its most eminent interpreters, had almost nothing to do with religion. The big books on this period—whether Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself, David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, or Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front—offer little beyond the obligatory quote from Reinhold Niebuhr or Charles Coughlin. Though religious people may have come along for the ride, the struggle over capitalism in these books is primarily a secular phenomenon. Even religion scholars tend to skirt the profound economic questions raised in these years, jumping from the turn-of-thecentury Social Gospel to the seemingly more promising territory of the Cold War and the civil rights movement. Yet many American critics of capitalism understood it specifically in terms of religion. In particular, a diverse assortment of agrarian thinkers and reformers interpreted the economic transition from agricultural to industrial society as the cause of a spiritual crisis. The processes of industrialization, urbanization, and centralization had severed Americans’ meaningful connections with each other and with the natural world. 37

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In response, agrarian dissenters championed an economy anchored in the land and a society organized around decentralized communities of independent producers. Their vision took widespread property ownership and meaningful work as the bulwarks of freedom and the catalysts for moral, spiritual, and ecological renewal. Agrarians thereby challenged the assumptions of modern economics from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, insisting that the specialization, alienation, and devaluation of labor under capitalism remained open to contestation or reversal. They also objected to the incipient welfare state’s increasingly quantitative approach to societal well-being, a perspective that tracked statistical measures of unemployment and inequality rather than attending to the content of work itself. Though the agrarians lost their immediate fight, their insistence on the moral and religious emptiness of the American economic order inspired challengers of that order for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. The agrarians operated outside the most commonly investigated tracks of social thought and political reform. They were not generally associated with the Social Gospel, an urban, industrial, Protestant phenomenon that tended to encourage state intervention, and sometimes socialism, as the means of “social salvation” from the forces of unrestrained capitalist greed. The agrarians constituted a different tradition of spiritual reform, one that shared the Social Gospel’s hostility to corporate capitalism but was more rural, more suspicious of the state, and less tied to Protestantism. Nor did the agrarians line up with the Social Gospel’s opponents, the religious proponents of modern capitalism. Though some scholarship tries to wedge the agrarians into a tradition of business conservatism, they in fact tried to separate the desirability of small property ownership from modern “finance-capitalism.” Economic alternatives, then, came not only from more well-known socialist movements, but also from appeals to the value of ownership and small property. In structuring their investigations of the interwar period around the two poles of Social Gospel progressivism and pro-business religious capitalism, religion scholars have more or less followed political his­ torians’ lead. Political histories, understandably, highlight the crystallization of modern liberalism and conservatism in this period. Studies of

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  39

the former tend to chart the welfare state from its ascendance in the 1930s to its travails in the 1970s, what one book calls “the rise and fall of the New Deal order.” More recent efforts have traced the “rise of the Right” and its apparent culmination in the election of Ronald Reagan. Though this Left-Right structure is a useful framework for understanding modern politics, its increasingly teleological perspective truncates the ideological diversity of the interwar years. Furthermore, that structure focuses so heavily on the national consolidation of politics that it neglects the regional allegiances, the physical and mythical loyalties to particular places, that also shaped ideology at this time. The three agrarians I discuss here argued that centralized political and economic structures had produced a spiritual calamity. These figures, born between 1880 and 1900, had witnessed both capitalism and mainline Protestantism gain unprecedented power. All three came to identify with positions and places outside the urban, industrial, northeastern, Protestant landscape. The scholar and poet John Crowe Ransom took the South as the location of economic virtue. The priest Luigi ­Ligutti articulated a distinctively Catholic version of agrarianism on the Midwestern prairies. And Richard Gregg, a labor lawyer who became one of the leading American supporters of the Indian independence movement, adopted Gandhian principles as the basis of a more humane economic order. These three figures do not fit neatly into the Left-Right dyad, but they do show how protests against those dominant ideological positions continue to emerge. John Crowe Ransom was born in Tennessee in 1888, the son and grandson of Methodist ministers. In a long academic career at Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College, Ransom gained prominence as a poet and a founder of New Criticism. However, for a short time from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, he turned his attention to the moral and spiritual implications of economic life. With Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, Ransom formed the nucleus of the Vanderbilt circle that published the 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand, a defense of rural Southern culture against encroaching Northern industrialism. After publishing that text, the group became known as the Agrarians. Although these ­capital-­­A Agrarians were only a small part of a much broader range of agrarian dissent, they did much to shape the intellectual debate over capitalism and religion.1

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Given the association of the South with the New Christian Right of the 1980s, the Nashville Agrarians are sometimes mistaken for fundamentalists. In fact, they were religious modernists and skeptics. Ransom was one of the most skeptical, but, like other observers of religion in this period, he appreciated from a distance the power of belief in a transcendent deity. His 1930 book God without Thunder raised the disturbing ­possibility that, without a robust “orthodox” religion to counteract it, capitalism would achieve complete domination of social life. At some level, this concern animated all of Ransom’s subsequent work. God without Thunder had something in common with contemporaneous attacks on liberal Protestantism, such as those leveled by Niebuhr. Like Niebuhr, Ransom denigrated mainline Christianity for its insipid conception of God. Where once the Almighty had been “mysterious, and not fully understood,” He had in recent theological renderings become “amiable and understandable.” The epitome of the new God was Jesus, the divine made entirely legible and comprehensible in human terms. Ransom may have been thinking of works such as Bruce Barton’s audacious 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows, which imagined the Savior with all the traits of a gregarious business executive.2 This shift in the character of divinity stood at the heart of what Ransom called his “economic interpretation of religion.” The new God was the God of science, a deity who encouraged His subjects to conquer ­nature in the service of progress, thereby providing the metaphysical ­justification for modern capitalism. “In the new religion of science,” Ransom quipped, “God is supposed to have had the goodness to invite man to profiteer upon the universe.” The result was industrialism (a term Ransom may have taken from Thomas Carlyle), in which human needs and pleasures are subordinated to the logic of money and machines. “Under industrialism, which we conceive to be our divinely appointed mission, we scourge ourselves like true fanatics.”3 Socialism did not offer an alternative to this runaway progress. Though many critics of the American economy endowed socialism with metaphysical significance, Ransom dismissed it in a later unpublished manuscript as no more than “the whole present apparatus of capitalism working on as now but under a different kind of administration.”4 The term industrialism neatly conveyed a system of production that might be under either private or state control. In the end, Ransom wrote, the

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  41

choice appeared to be between two undesirable economies, “violent ­irresponsible” capitalism and “dull tyrannical” socialism.5 The way out of this impossible binary was a society anchored by self-sufficient farmers. None of the decentralists advocated going completely back to the land under conditions of primitive subsistence (in fact, they thought that some modern technologies might actually benefit the agrarian impulse). Nevertheless, they shared a common view that the United States had become dangerously weighted in favor of urbanism. The 1920 census revealed that, for the first time, over half of Americans lived in towns and cities. Franklin Roosevelt, in a forgotten section of his first inaugural address, asserted that “we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.” For Ransom, land was the site of authentic labor. Under industrial conditions, work was a necessary evil, a monotonous means to an end. However, labor ought to be “an art and a luxury,” and the finest labor, as Ransom saw it, was the labor of the farmer. “The infinite variety of ­nature makes it impossible for one day’s farming to repeat another’s, or for two rows to be plowed alike.” Connection with nature restored the sense of contingency and mystery that had been lost in the age of “God without Thunder.” Ransom impishly wrote to Tate while at work on the book that one could “substitute nature for the Lord and he won’t feel aggrieved.”6 At the heart of the agrarian critique was the economic distinction between use-value and exchange-value, most famously analyzed by Marx in his discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital. Agrarians urged Americans to get back to producing things for themselves, not for sale in capitalist marketplaces. “The steel maker makes steel, or at least some part of it,” Ransom chided in his unpublished manuscript, titled simply “Land!,” “but he cannot eat steel, nor clothe himself with it, nor shelter under it from the rain: there being no direct connection between his own act of manufacture and what he needs in order to live.” The God without Thunder was kin to the commodity fetish.7 Ransom’s book has generally been considered a failure for its incoherent view of religion. “We had better work within the religious institutions that we have,” the author concluded, “and do what we can to

42  Joseph Kip Kosek

recover the excellences of the ancient faith.” His heart wasn’t in it, though. Later in the 1930s, Ransom briefly tried attending a Methodist church and even taught Sunday school, but he faced criticism for refusing to recite the Apostles’ Creed and soon gave up the experiment. The man who had made such an emphatic case for the old religion could not himself embrace its tenets. For the rest of their careers, the Nashville Agrarians would try to find a substitute for the faith that had been abandoned in the new industrial order.8 Like other agrarians, the Nashville circle tied its spiritual and moral critique to a particular place, in this case the South. The interwar period had seen an unprecedented consolidation of national culture, both by large corporations and then by the federal government’s New Deal projects. Partly as a response, identification with regions became more robust in the 1930s, not simply as a recourse to tradition but as a self-­ conscious remedy for the spiritual emptiness of a homogenous, generically “American” landscape. Intellectuals at the time and later scholars have often read this place-based social thought as somehow less significant than the decade’s grand abstract theories of social structure, human nature, and economic transformation (Liberalism and Social Action, Moral Man and Immoral Society, and so on). Yet this devotion to place remains an important feature of modernity, not a curious atavism. I’ll Take My Stand posited the region of the South as the repository of values that could resist industrialism. Though the compilation did not focus centrally on religion, it made a kind of sequel to God without Thunder. The South’s ostensible economic backwardness was in fact a source of hope, as Southern farmers who had never lost connection to the land could now lead a return to it. The incompletely industrialized former Confederacy could save America from resignation to capitalist inevitability. The idea of the South became a kind of substitute god. White supremacy was part of that idea. The contributors to I’ll Take My Stand generally supported Jim Crow, though the specifics of their views differed. Davidson was a fervent segregationist, while, at the other extreme, Herman Clarence Nixon eventually became estranged from the group for promoting racial equality. Ransom was among those in the middle who thought agrarianism should steer clear of explicit stands on race.

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  43

Yet his writings and those of the Agrarian circle clearly exhibit a r­ acist ideology in their nostalgia for the Confederacy, their condemnation of the Civil War as industrialist imperialism in which slavery played little part, and their general erasure of African American farmers. The old god that Ransom wanted back, it seemed, was a deity with the power to set the bounds of community and to exclude those outside it. The Nashville Agrarians understood Northern capitalists and proponents of African American citizenship to be part of the same nefarious project to undermine the agrarian dream, and the image of humble white farmers as the truest Americans has persisted among some more recent agrarians. African Americans did have their own versions of agrarianism, inspired by the tenets of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, among others. Though whites often interpreted Washingtonian self-help as a substitute for political equality, Blacks viewed property ownership as an important form of power, a step up from the precarious life of the sharecropper. In this pre-civil-rights era, the structures of government were mostly useless, if not hostile, compared with the benefits of modest ­access to productive land.9 The Agrarians fell apart by the late 1930s, though they would continue to search for the answer to Ransom’s puzzle in God without Thunder. Davidson became an increasingly staunch opponent of African American equality, while Tate, more ambivalent about the South, eventually converted to Catholicism. For his part, Ransom abandoned any hope of economic reform and turned to the realm of art. The modern “division of labor,” he admitted in 1945, constituted “the only terms practicable now” for society, and that division was necessary for works of aesthetic genius to be produced. In fact, Ransom said he was proudest of the former Agrarians’ later work “defending the freedom of the arts.”10 At one level, the distance from economics to cultural criticism was not so far as it looked, for the Nashville group’s social thought had always been in part a literary venture. Other critics would try to put agrarian principles more immediately into action. Unlike Ransom, Luigi Ligutti knew who his God was, and he insisted that God had a living role to play in creating a humane economic order. An ambitious Italian immigrant, Ligutti became the youngest

44  Joseph Kip Kosek

Catholic priest in the United States when he was ordained in 1917 at age twenty-two. His appointment to rural Iowa might have seemed a discouraging exile to the geographical periphery of Catholic life, but Ligutti made the rural culture of the Midwest the foundation of his highly successful career. He later went on to lead the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, which addressed issues of food and farming around the world, and served as a Vatican observer at the United Nations.11 Ligutti’s agrarian vision followed an imperative to reform capitalism emanating from the highest levels of the Catholic hierarchy. In his 1931 encyclical, Pius XI inveighed against “an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship . . . consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds.” The American bishops issued a 1934 statement that condemned “crowded industrial centers” and called for the revival of “independent home owners in rural communities.” These pronouncements singled out ownership, not simply economic equality, as a crucial element in a healthy society.12 English Catholic thought also provided justification for Ligutti’s efforts. The now obscure theory of distributism, associated chiefly with Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, offered agrarians a positive philosophy for their anti-capitalist predilections. In The Restoration of Property and The Servile State, Belloc denounced both capitalism and socialism in favor of a society of small landowners. In the United States, the extravagant medievalism of these two contrarians was less interesting than their insistence on widely distributed property as the basis of freedom. Across the ocean, the distributists’ property owners looked less like medieval peasants and more like Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Ligutti was especially inspired by reading Tate’s friend Herbert Agar, an American popularizer of distributism and editor of the journal Free America. Ligutti was not the only American Catholic seeking to put agrarian ideals into practice. In the year the bishops made their statement, the first issue of the Catholic Worker was distributed in New York’s Union Square. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin conceived of their project as an anarchist experiment in the politics of scale. Though the Catholic Worker movement was centered in New York, it viewed the city with trepidation and championed an agrarian renaissance dubbed the Green Revolution. Be-

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  45

ginning in the 1930s, Catholic Workers maintained, with mixed success, a series of communal farming experiments intended to spark this transformation. At one time, Ligutti considered joining the group himself but found its methods too chaotic for his tastes.13 To enact Catholic economic ideals, Luigi founded the Granger Homesteads settlement in Iowa. Granger was a federally funded initiative that resettled coal miners and their families on small plots of land and helped them work at farming and handicraft production to supplement the inadequate seasonal wages from mining. This plan, then, did not envision a wholesale back-to-the-land revolution, but rather a measure of security against the vicissitudes of the money economy and the capitalist labor market.14 Ligutti’s agrarianism diverged from the most prominent progressive interpretation of Catholic social thought, that of the economist John A. Ryan. Labeled the “Right Reverend New Dealer” for his support of the Roosevelt administration, Ryan had originally catalyzed Catholic and non-Catholic reformers alike with his 1906 book A Living Wage, a refutation of laissez-faire economics that insisted on the community obligation to provide a guaranteed level of subsistence for workers.15 Ligutti greatly admired Ryan’s commitment to social justice, but he thought that the latter’s focus on higher wages was inadequate. In Ryan’s view, Ligutti recalled, “what the worker needs is more money,” while ­Ligutti’s own philosophy held that “it isn’t the amount of money, it’s what he doesn’t have to buy that counts.” Catholic agrarians imagined that ­cycles of production and consumption could still operate somewhat outside the cash nexus, in contexts that they saw as more amenable to true religion.16 Ligutti hoped that the federal government’s economic reforms would promote agrarian independence. He befriended M. L. Wilson, the director of the homesteads initiative, and before naming the settlement for the nearby town of Granger, the priest mused that he might call it “NEWDEAL.” However, he quickly came to rue the difficulties created by an unwieldy bureaucracy administering an exercise in self-sufficiency. Seemingly endless impediments threatened the project and tried ­Ligutti’s patience. When he received an unanticipated request from Washington for a scientific soil survey, he mailed back, as proof of his region’s fertility,

46  Joseph Kip Kosek

some ears of corn and a cucumber, adding drily, “I hope you delay no longer on this account.” (Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote back to insist that a soil survey was a standard requirement for all homestead projects.) With his vegetables, Ligutti argued for the superiority of immediate place-based experience over the government’s simplified forms of knowledge.17 Following these early difficulties, the first homes were finally occupied in December 1935. Unlike the Nashville Agrarians, who looked to the farm as the bulwark of old-stock native whiteness, Luigi tried to make Granger reflect the European immigrant diversity of the Midwest, including Italians and Croatians, Protestants and Catholics. The families chosen “represent a cross section of our area,” he boasted, “as to age, income, social standing, nationality, religion, occupation, size, etc.”18 Farming was, at one level, a gentle way of promoting American pluralism. Still, the community remained unrepresentative in its restriction to white families, in this way following the pattern of segregation that prevailed in all the subsistence homestead settlements. Granger Homesteads was widely considered one of the most successful of the New Deal communities of its kind. Homesteaders lived in modern, electrified houses on plots of about four acres. Seed, fertilizer, and farm equipment were distributed through cooperatives, and finances were handled by the community’s own credit union. Visitors came to the settlement from around the country; Eleanor Roosevelt made a highly publicized stop in 1936. Though Ligutti left the project in 1941 to work full-time for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, the community survived for many more years as a model of agrarian living.19 Ligutti became one of the most visible promoters of the Catholic agrarian vision, appearing in Catholic journals, regional and national newspapers, and on the radio. His 1940 book Rural Roads to Security, coauthored with John C. Rawe, was the most extended statement of his ideas. The book laid out in stark terms an indictment of capitalist America: “The materialistic philosophy of industrialism, of city life, of selfish, greedy competition, has been and is the real opponent of Christianity.” Ligutti and Rawe traced the problem in part to modern alienation from labor and from the natural world. Modern people offered up “not a hymn of thanksgiving to God but to the machine, the railroad, the

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  47

board of trade, and the middle man. . . . Vegetables appear on market stalls, fruits come wrapped in tissue paper, flour in sacks, potatoes in chips, and carrots are diced.”20 While business and government leaders celebrated the wide distribution of such consumer goods, they had little interest in distributing property itself. Striking a Jeffersonian note, Ligutti and Rawe insisted that “there is no liberty possible where there is no widespread ownership of property.” Without that, the name of the economic system did not make much difference. Capitalism and communism “move in parallel columns under similar management toward the common destructive objective, the Totalitarian State.” The “so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” the authors remarked with disdain, was simply “the dictatorship over the Proletariat by the chief Communist Bureaucrat.”21 Ligutti and Rawe championed the family as the chief defense against both industrialism and overweening state power. The Depression-era agrarians did not emphasize individualism in the manner of Ayn Rand and later libertarian authors. Instead, they saw the “productive home” as the building block of the good society. They idealized the homestead “where a family, preserving the natural bonds of integration and unity, lives and works; cares for the home gardens and orchards, cows, pigs, and chickens; cultivates and raises a variety of food.” The productive home strengthened families by knitting them together in common projects, while also bolstering communities and the nation.22 The difficulty of owning property was undermining the family as an economic unit. Ligutti and Rawe lamented that “the home is now little more than an inn, a stopping-off place for eating and sleeping.” Urban living undermined domestic self-sufficiency by encouraging renting, by squeezing couples into compact apartments inadequate for productive (and reproductive) activity, and by fostering complete dependence on the money economy. In hyperbolic terms Ligutti and Rawe declared cities the “graveyards of the family.”23 This valorization of the home reveals the patriarchal tendencies of many agrarians, both in distinctly Catholic worries about birth control and in a broader emphasis on male heads of household that the Catholics shared with other kinds of agrarians. The productive family relied on essentialist categories of gender. “A man is more virile physically to brave

48  Joseph Kip Kosek

the exacting toil for daily bread,” Ligutti and Rawe theorized, “whereas the woman is blessed with a nature in keeping with her prerogative of childbearing and the management of the household.” In this emphasis on the male producer, Ligutti actually shared common assumptions with Ryan, who intended his “living wage” to be a family wage sufficient to allow a working father to support his wife and children.24 This patriarchal outlook was tied to a critique of capitalism that offered an alternative model of unalienated labor. Ligutti and Rawe thought that the productive family actually offered more agency to women than did the capitalist labor market. They hoped that as many Americans as possible, men and women, could avoid the regimentation and insecurity that accompanied the modern degradation of work. The farm wife, they contended, was an “active partner in the whole enterprise. The farm office and management is in the home, and not in some remote office building.”25 In a similar vein, the photographs in Rural Roads to ­Security depicted high school classes at Granger Homesteads. The students learned practical skills divided by gender: woodworking for boys, weaving for girls. Yet the images depict a rough equivalence. The positions of the boys at their table saw do not look much different from those of the girls at their loom. Both are engaged in the productive manual labor that Catholic agrarians held to be central to religion and democracy alike.26 The Catholic agrarians show that “laboring” culture was not the ­exclusive preserve of the Popular Front. Ligutti and Rawe used Marxist concepts unapologetically, describing, for instance, the condition of American propertylessness as “proletarianism.” However, their antidotes diverged sharply from Marxist prescriptions. They sought to defend a tradition of American small producers, rather than assuming that those producers had to be swept up into modern industrial conglomerates. They resisted the Marxist sense of an inexorable unfolding of historical progress. This was ironic, for the Catholic Church resembled 1930s Marxism in its authoritarian faith, but somehow that imposing religious behemoth gave Ligutti the spiritual resources to champion economic production on a human scale.27 The agrarians fit awkwardly into categories of Left and Right, but the Nashville circle and the rural Catholic movement most often get as-

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  49

similated into narratives of American conservatism. Indeed, some of the most important articles on these groups were written in the 1970s by ­Edward S. Shapiro, a self-described “conservative historian.”28 Yet parallel kinds of arguments about capitalism and spirituality emerged from voices associated with the Left. My third example, Richard Gregg, proposed a Gandhian version of agrarianism. In some previous work, I have looked at his theories of nonviolence and the way they influenced the civil rights movement, but Gregg also developed a distinctive outlook on economics. He had no investment in Southern racial hierarchy or Catholic orthodoxy. Rather, his interlocutors were socialists, anti-­imperialists, and liberal Protestants. Still, Gregg shared the hope for meaningful labor through ownership that motivated agrarians more generally. The son of a Colorado minister, Gregg considered himself religious but did not identify with any particular church, another example of the unconventional spirituality prominent among agrarian dissenters. He spent his early career in the constellation of forces that the agrarians learned to distrust: big business, big labor, and big government. He worked for a law office that specialized in labor-management issues, for the National War Labor Board during World War I, and for a railway union during a massive strike. These experiences soured Gregg on the industrial economy and led him to doubt the most popular methods of reforming it, labor unionism and government mediation. By chance he found an article about Mohandas Gandhi and became fascinated with the mahatma’s struggle against British colonialism. When Gregg lost his job with the union after the strike, he made up his mind to go to India, leaving on New Year’s Day in 1925. He stayed four years.29 Gregg did not gravitate immediately toward Gandhi’s theories of nonviolent direct action; instead, his first writings about India analyzed the mahatma’s controversial advocacy of handicraft production, called khaddar after the homespun cloth made by his disciples. Exemplified by the spinning wheel, the “constructive programme” would, in Gandhi’s view, give Indians economic and spiritual independence from the British. In the 1920s and 1930s, before he became canonized as the prophet of nonviolent liberation, the mahatma was understood in part as a provocative economic reformer. In fact, Gandhi shared many of the same intellectual influences as American agrarians, even if the Americans often treated him as an exotic specimen.30

50  Joseph Kip Kosek

To be sure, many Westerners found the khaddar system rather silly, an anachronistic retreat from the modern world. For agrarians, though, it seemed to offer a living example of what they hoped to achieve. The homesteader Ralph Borsodi was delighted to learn that Indian cloth production still operated on the scale of the family and the village, and he hoped that Gandhi’s forces would triumph over the “quantity-minded business men who are determined that the whole world shall be made safe for the factory.”31 Several agrarians mentioned Gandhi as a kindred spirit, but Gregg went further. In a series of articles and in a 1928 book called Economics of Khaddar, Gregg undertook a lengthy defense of ­Gandhi’s outlook as an alternative to Western capitalism.32 Gregg excoriated capitalist society’s “enormous concentration of material power and wealth,” a “moral evil” and “a temptation which human nature cannot withstand.” He also drew on the concept of alienation that was common among agrarians. The “working classes” under industrial capitalism had become “helpless” and “parasitic.” “A man ceases to be able to provide for himself. The ordinary city dweller cannot make his own clothing or shoes or house or furniture, or produce or prepare his own food.”33 As with Ransom and Ligutti, commodification rather than property ownership was the key problem. “The evils of modern capitalism,” Gregg opined, “perhaps come more from the defects and misuse of money than from private property.”34 The loss of individual agency upset Gregg even before the Great Depression made capitalism more vulnerable to criticism. Many of Gregg’s interlocutors on the Protestant Left embraced ­socialism as the antidote to capitalism’s evils, but he never did. While ­appreciating some of the goals of socialism, he contrasted it with “Gan­ dhiism” and found the latter far superior. Socialism shared with capitalism a predilection for bigness, leading both systems to produce distant, unresponsive bureaucracies and military violence. Soviet Russia, Gregg’s paradigmatic example of socialism, had more in common with capitalist America than either side wanted to admit.35 Against these inhuman systems, Gregg championed Gandhi’s vision of decentralized, village-based economies. Admitting that Western readers might scoff at this solution, Gregg insisted that khaddar could be a powerful instrument of spiritual renewal for India, at least, and possibly

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  51

for the United States as well. “In the West,” he explained, “material power has taken the bit in its teeth and run away from the control of the spirit.” The small scale of the spinning wheel made it religiously superior, for “since the material power which drives it is man’s hand, there is no loss of psychological and moral control or responsibility.” Similarly, the simplicity of hand spinning promoted humility, which Gregg defined as “a true sense of spiritual proportion, a sense of one’s relative importance in relation to God and his power.” This interpretation of Gandhi posited that conditions of production actually shaped religious experience in crucial ways.36 If Ransom’s ideal producer was a yeoman farmer in the American South, and Ligutti pictured an Italian Catholic peasant, Gregg drew on the equally romanticized figure of the modest Indian villager. He took decentralization to be an Eastern or “Asiatic” insight that the West had either forgotten or ignored. Yet Gregg was not merely an Orientalist mystic. A student of economics, psychology, and natural science, he was less an antimodern or Orientalist mystic than the theorist of an alternative modernity. The agrarians generally championed the values of family, community, and race over more cosmopolitan sensibilities, but Gregg was different in that his defense of village economies sprung from his deep interest in cultural difference and his faith that societies as different as India and the United States could borrow from each other to create new, more humane ways of life. Gregg’s approach caught on among believers in nonviolence during the 1940s. World War II discredited pacifist politics by showing the apparent necessity of deadly force in the global struggle against tyranny. So pacifists turned inward, focusing on concrete practices that would model a peaceful society rather than political agitation. Increasingly, they turned to the farm. Opponents of war had long used the image of beating swords into plowshares, and while the plowshare might symbolize any kind of peaceful technology, it was in the end a specifically agricultural implement that reflected a faith in the inherent peacefulness of agrarian living. Antioch College students began Ahimsa Farm in Ohio, while Clarence Jordan founded the interracial Koinonia Farm in Georgia. Though these efforts had limited success in their day, they inspired some of the backto-the-land experiments of the 1960s. Koinonia survived to become a key symbol of religious nonviolence during the civil rights movement.37

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Gregg himself gravitated in 1948 to the Vermont farm of Scott and Helen Nearing, leading proponents of self-sufficient living. The Nearings epitomized the combination of economic critique and heterodox religion that distinguished other agrarians. Scott was a Marxist economist whose radicalism had led to his dismissal from an academic position in the Wharton School of Business, while Helen had grown up in Theosophy, a faith whose connection to India may have intrigued Gregg. The Nearing homesteads, first in Vermont and, after a 1952 move, in Maine, were not explicitly religious but operated according to a kind of ascetic nature theology.38 With their connection to nonviolence, their spirituality, and their location in northern New England, the Nearings became icons of the 1960s counterculture. Meanwhile, Gregg’s concept of “voluntary simplicity,” originally coined in his 1936 pamphlet of that title, became widely praised (if perhaps less widely adopted). In short, Gregg’s agrarian ideas held the seeds of a new model of dissent that would blossom decades later. Despite their manifest eccentricities, the agrarians’ discontent foretold the contradictions that fractured the New Deal order, as well as the mainline Protestant order, in the 1960s and 1970s. In those later decades, a counterculture positioned itself against the spiritual lifelessness of both capitalism and communism. E. F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful invoked “Buddhist economics” in the search for a sustainable future. Meanwhile, from the Right, a resurgent Christian fundamentalism demonized the federal government as a threat to home and family. At the same time, a self-conscious attempt to revive the agrarian tradition was undertaken by the Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry, who, in works such as The Unsettling of America, excoriated industrial agriculture and insisted that true religion depended upon a humane economy. Agrarian currents continue to disrupt religious and secular politics in our own moment. Michael Pollan, hero of Whole Foods–shopping progressives, casts the “Christian libertarian” farmer Joel Salatin as the central character in his attack on industrial food production. Urban farming gains strength in the countercultural meccas of New York and San Francisco, as well as deindustrialized Rust Belt cities such as Milwaukee and Detroit. Meanwhile, some two million of the nation’s children receive their education through homeschooling as parents from a

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  53

variety of religious and political positions play another variation on the old agrarian idea of the productive family. We can line up all of these people into Left and Right columns and demand that they reveal their true liberal or conservative identities, so we can know whether to like them or not. I suggest instead that the spiritual calamity of modern bigness created insurgencies that escape our categories. Those insurgencies championed what Schumacher called “the virtues of smallness,” and whether we find those virtues inspiring or illusory, they show us how capitalism became not only an economic problem but an ethical and religious one as well. Notes 1. On the Southern Agrarians, see Paul Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Daniel Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). 2.  John Crowe Ransom, God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of ­Orthodoxy (1930; Hamden, CT: Archon, 1965), 29, 5. 3. Ransom, God without Thunder, 116, 25, 186. 4.  John Crowe Ransom, “Land!” (unpublished manuscript), box 3, series 2, John Crowe Ransom Papers, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, chapter 4, 32–33; chapter 3, 30. 5.  Ransom, “Land!,” Ransom Papers, chapter 3, 30. 6. Ransom, God without Thunder, 192, 194; John Crowe Ransom to Allen Tate, July 4, 1929, in Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and George Core (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 180. 7.  Ransom, “Land!,” Ransom Papers, chapter 4, 9–11. 8. Ransom, God without Thunder, 325; Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 271. 9.  Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

54  Joseph Kip Kosek 10.  John Crowe Ransom, “Art and the Human Economy,” Kenyon Review 7, no. 4 (October 1, 1945): 686–87. 11.  On Ligutti, see Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000), 149–76; Vincent A. Yzermans, The People I Love: A Biography of Luigi G. Ligutti (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1976). 12.  On Catholic agrarians, see David S. Bovée, The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–2007 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); Paul C. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 294–304; Christopher Hamlin and John McGreevy, “The Greening of America, Catholic Style, 1930–1950,” Environmental History 11 ( July 2006): 464–99; Jeffrey D. Marlett, Saving the Heartland: Catholic Missionaries in Rural America, 1920–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Edward S. Shapiro, “Catholic Agrarian Thought and the New Deal,” in Clio From the Right: Essays of a Conservative Historian (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983). 13.  Luigi Ligutti, interview by Vincent Yzermans, January 10–14, 1972, transcript, box 1, series 9, Luigi Ligutti Papers, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 120. 14.  On Granger Homesteads, see Paul C. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 294–304. 15.  On Ryan and the broader debate over the living wage, see Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 16.  Ligutti, interview by Yzermans, January 10–14, 1972, Ligutti Papers, 115–16. 17.  Luigi Ligutti to Walter Terpenning, November 15, 1935, box 1, series 4, Ligutti Papers; Luigi Ligutti to W. S. Matthews, September 5, 1934, box 1, series 4, Ligutti Papers; Harold Ickes to Luigi Ligutti, September 19, 1934, box 1, series 4, Ligutti Papers. 18.  Luigi Ligutti to Charlotte Smith, August 15, 1934, box 1, series 4, Ligutti Papers. 19.  Granger Homesteads, brochure, box 1, series 4, Ligutti Papers; Russell Lord and Paul H. Johnstone, A Place on Earth: A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1942). 20.  Luigi Ligutti and John C. Rawe, Rural Roads to Security [n.p., 1940], 301, 152. 21.  Ligutti and Rawe, Rural Roads, 295, 18, 29. 22.  Ligutti and Rawe, Rural Roads, 121. 23.  Ligutti and Rawe, Rural Roads, 61, 65.

American Capitalism and Agrarian Spiritual Dissent in the 1930s  55 24.  Ligutti and Rawe, Rural Roads, 51. 25.  Ligutti and Rawe, Rural Roads, 299. 26.  On 1930s images of the farm family, see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 52–81. 27.  On the “laboring” of American culture, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997). 28. Shapiro, Clio From the Right. 29.  Joseph Kip Kosek, “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1318–48 30.  On Gandhi’s economic thought, see David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 66–93. 31.  Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929), 115. 32.  Richard B. Gregg, Economics of Khaddar (Madras: Ganesan, 1928). 33.  Richard B. Gregg, “The Morals of Machinery,” Current Thought, February 1926, 172–74. 34.  Richard B. Gregg, Gandhiism versus Socialism (New York: John Day, 1932), 26. 35.  Richard B. Gregg, Gandhism and Socialism: A Study and Comparison (Madras: Ganesan, 1931); Gregg, Gandhiism versus Socialism. 36.  Richard B. Gregg, “Aspects of Spiritual and Moral Beauty in Charkha and Khaddar,” Modern Review (November 1925): 566, 563. 37.  Patricia Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture Between World War I and the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Tracy Elaine K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). 38.  On the Nearings, see Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading as Spiritual Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

CHAPTER 3

“The answers were apocryphal!” Protestantism and the Politics of Pluralism in Phylon’s Early Years Josef Sorett ★



The answers were apocryphal For those within the mythic wall Whose serpent’s wisdom poisoned all: The liberation came to man When Harvey’s chart showed how blood ran, And Newton’s apple with rhythmic plan Fell to the ground. —William S. Braithwaite

Founding Phylon In 1933, twenty-three years after leaving to take a post as director of publicity and research at the then recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), W. E. B. Du Bois accepted an offer to rejoin the faculty of Atlanta University. As founding editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis, he had spent more than two decades on the front lines of race politics and civil rights activism. In this regard, 56

“The answers were apocryphal!”  57

Du Bois was in the vanguard of a group of writers engaged in what the historian David Levering Lewis has referred to as an effort at achieving “civil rights by copyright.”1 Indeed, before finding himself at odds with the NAACP’s new president, Walter White, in the 1930s, The Crisis provided Du Bois with his primary vehicle for waging war against “the color line.” Now, the seasoned scholar, author, and activist returned to the academic institution where he had launched his career during the 1890s by publishing a string of major studies, namely, the Atlanta University publication series.2 Several years after settling into his new role as chair of Atlanta ­University’s Sociology department, and at the spritely age of seventy-­ two, Du Bois launched yet another new project. Phylon: The Atlanta University R ­ eview of Race and Culture printed its first issue in 1940. If anyone was ­inclined to read Du Bois’s return to academia as a retreat from the battlefield of race politics, the journal’s first number disabused readers of any such notion. With the vision of an Encyclopedia Africana gradually unraveling before Northern philanthropic boards, Phylon provided Du Bois with an outlet for his energies.3 His international vision, anti-­ colonial analysis, and commitment to engaging America’s race problem were readily apparent, in terms of both the journal’s leadership and the substance of the contributions. In addition to original scholarship on everything from the “social conditions” of the South to “Architectural Acoustics,” visual art and poetry, and bibliographical resources, it also provided a contemporary “Chronicle of Race Relations.” Phylon’s intellectual ­ambitions included the artistic, social, and political lives of race in the ­modern world. In assembling an editorial board, Du Bois gathered a team of scholars that was compelling in its academic pedigree and cosmopolitanism. The journal’s managing editor was Ira De A. Reid, the son of a Baptist preacher who joined the Society of Friends and became the first black faculty member tenured at Haverford College. William H. Dean Jr. was also a minister’s son. One of the first black economists, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and later joined the staff of the soon-to-form United Nations. The first issue of Phylon identified him simply as a “sometime Harvard fellow.” W. Mercer Cook, a Roman Catholic, was a professor of French at Atlanta University. He was also a diplomat who went on to

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serve in ambassadorial posts in Senegal, the Gambia, and Niger. The group also included the British-born feudal historian Rushton Coulborn, an Atlanta University professor who was a “former Vice-Principal of ­Sussex House” in London. Oran W. Eagleson, a professor of psychology and longtime dean at Spelman College (and later Peace Corps consultant) was also enlisted. Finally, the poet and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, who was generally considered to be the first Negro literary critic, rounded out the committee. Phylon’s advisers also included Atlanta University’s current president, Rufus Clement, and acknowledged two renowned historians as contributing editors: Horace Mann Bond and Rayford Logan. Bond was then president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia and would shortly take the helm at Lincoln University. Logan, a Harvard graduate and longtime Howard University professor, was also a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” a capacity in which he would soon draft FDR’s executive order to end the exclusion of black people from service in World War II.4 Phylon’s masthead was, in short, a list of leading black intellectuals—and, more precisely, race men—of the day.5 Though Du Bois probably penned it on his own, the editorial team was credited with a three-page “Apology” that made the case for the value of another “new venture.” Phylon was to offer a “new view of the social sciences,” they explained, one that “emphasize[d] the use and place of human differences as tool and method of progress.” In doing so, the journal would provide a “new orientation and duty” to intellectual inquiry that extended beyond “the internal study of race groups” to a “general view of that progress of human beings.” The “Apology” explained further that Phylon would “proceed from the point of view and the experience of the black folk where we live and work, to the wider world.”6 Otherwise put, for Phylon’s editors, an analysis of African American life was necessarily significant on the global scale and for human progress. In this regard, their approach was indicative of a historical moment in which black artists and intellectuals became increasingly aware of their importance on both the national and international stage. In turn, they were more willing to stake a claim about the universality of the racial particulars.7

“The answers were apocryphal!”  59

The growth of this global black perspective, and with it attending aspirations, became apparent in commercial culture, radio and print media, and political organizing, as well as in the formation of international dialogues that brought black artists, intellectuals, and activists together to grapple with what they understood to be the issues most pressing to black people around the world.8 Within the United States, such commitments took the form, for instance, of the Double Victory campaign, which linked American efforts to dismantle fascism in Europe with domestic struggles to end racial segregation.9 In its own way, Phylon announced a new era in black intellectual life, providing an academic base from which to mount claims consistent with the international view of the Double V platform that were buttressed by the new authority of modern (social) science. Questions associated with race and culture ­difference were a primary concern. Yet Phylon was also animated by a ­religious impulse that was evident, if not explicitly articulated, in the “Apology.” To be sure, a general liberal optimism underwrote much of black ambition and aided interracial efforts to dismantle segregation during this time. However, Phylon’s editorial vision was also informed by and emblematic of a religious liberalism that was enunciated anew in American culture, more broadly, during World War II.10 Phylon’s liberal religious vision, first of all, was grounded in an awareness of the racial past and the desire to rectify past wrongs. As the ­“Apology” explained, the journal was committed to debunking the idea that “the industrial organization of the nineteenth century”—that is, the plantation economy of racial slavery—“was permanent and sacred.” By 1940 slavery had been abolished for almost eighty years. Now, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the task was to “abolish the present economic illiteracy” as a step toward ending material deprivation. In this view, race (i.e., slavery) and class (i.e., poverty) were cast along a historical continuum, as well as upon an international horizon; the editors’ language highlighted how such social orders had been granted the status of divine authority. As a counter, Phylon set its sights on publishing social-­ science research, racial and cultural commentary, and cultural production (i.e., literary and visual arts) that would face “the problem of abolishing poverty as a first step toward real freedom, democracy and art among men.”11

60  Josef Sorett

Such a proclamation of “freedom, democracy and art” was entirely consistent with a distinctly modernist brand of Christianity and a broader strand of religious liberalism, which was forged at the time out of encounters with racial and cultural difference facilitated by the war and a new era of international air travel.12 Moreover, such asymmetrical encounters often led to a figuring of cultural difference (i.e., the racial and religious “other”) as an entity to include and embrace and of social inequality as a goal to be overcome. Novel avenues of cultural contact, in this view, offered inspiration to spread the values of Western democracy and extend the boundaries of the human community. Embracing cultural pluralism was, in short, envisioned as a pathway toward the end of world peace. The tributaries of such liberal religious ambitions were evident, for instance, in such novel political projects as the United Nations (1945), which formed later in the decade, and the utopian vision articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).13 Similarly, with the aid of social-scientific methods, Phylon would help “make straight the path to a common world humanity through the development of cultural gifts to their highest possibilities.”14 Phylon’s grand vision of the international significance of race squared well with the entangled projects of religious and cultural pluralism that gained in prominence at the time. Many black leaders were invested and active participants in this pluralist effort to extend democracy, and the “American Way,” to the world.15 At the same time, pluralism also offered African Americans, as subjects still on the underside of Jim Crow, a set of ideas through which to make a claim for an end to segregation and their full inclusion as citizens within the United States. Yet pluralism was not simply a neutral ideology. Nor was it naturally aligned with racial equality or with expanding democracy. Rather, pluralism provided a set of discursive, legal, and social practices that aligned with a particular idea of religion even as it policed—coercing conformity from and/or ­rendering illegible—those forms of religion that failed to adhere to its norms. Phylon mobilized novel theories of pluralism to help its readers rethink racial and cultural difference, and to educate a broader public on such matters. Nevertheless, the scope of the journal’s engagement with religion was also constrained by pluralism’s prescriptive powers, which took cues from a normative liberal Protestantism.16

“The answers were apocryphal!”  61

In this way, Phylon’s early years offer a compelling case study of an occasion in which political and religious histories were equally at stake. Though typically received within the registers of politics—race politics, more precisely—the journal’s proceedings offer just as much that is of interest to scholars of religion in America. As a “Review of Race and Culture,” Phylon waged a full-scale intellectual attack on the dominant racial social science of the day, which abounded with narratives of black pathology and hyper-religiosity all at once. Even better, hyper-religiosity was often pointed to as evidence of black deviance from, and deprivation of, the values and practices that befit modern democratic subjects.17 An abundance of religiosity and an absence of reason were imagined as definitive of black life. In response to this context, then, a cohort of scholars forged a field of inquiry that figured a normative Afro-Protestantism as the embodiment of all that dominant social science of the day argued African American culture was not. In this view, the idea of a politically engaged “Negro Church” came to define the study of black religion.18 Phylon was no exception to this rule. Thus far, through an engagement with the “Apology” that appeared in the journal’s first issue, I have attempted to outline some of Phylon’s primary concerns. In doing so, I have also highlighted that how the editorial board cast its vision was emblematic of the tensions attendant to a scholarly publication that both subscribed to the objective airs of social science and sought to intervene concretely in race politics. Moreover, I have suggested that Phylon’s delicate dance between its descriptive (i.e., academic) and prescriptive (i.e., activist) commitments was also informed by the emerging discourse of pluralism in the United States, which had its own distinctive (liberal) religious genealogy.19 As such, Phylon’s early years offer scholars of American history a rich resource for understanding how race politics and religion—really, a privileged Protestantism— converged to help set the course for the study of African American culture. Phylon’s editorial vision was no exception to such norms. Indeed, it was in keeping with what Barbara Dianne Savage has described as “the politics of black religion” as they took shape during the 1930s and 1940s.20 As part of these developments, the journal not only published pioneering work on black religious life but also participated in the construction of

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a particular kind of “black religion” as an object of academic inquiry. ­Although not an explicitly stated aim, Phylon helped to valorize a liberal Afro-­Protestantism as normative for the study (and practice) of black religion, and it reinforced the same as the norm against which a broader array of ideas, practices, and social arrangements that comprised black religious and cultural life were measured. In short, Phylon offered one response to the question of what constituted “good religion” in the context of black life, which at the moment reflected a broader set of debates about cultural difference, Western democracy, and the United States’ place in the world during and after World War II.21 As the editors put it in their “Apology,” the journal aspired to help “make straight the path to a common world humanity through the development of cultural gifts to their highest possibilities.”22 Indeed, as Phylon’s early proceedings confirm, religion was a key site of contestation over the long history of the culture wars. To further ­clarify this matter, the remainder of this chapter will examine several essays that Phylon published on the subject of religion (really, Christianity) during its first years. In this regard, Edward Nelson Palmer’s “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro,” Effie Lee Newsome’s “Early Figures in Haitian Methodism,” and René Maran’s interview with Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka illustrate how a particular vision of race (and) politics set the parameters for the kind of religion that would be privileged, and how religion would be presented to Phylon’s modern readers. Additionally, each of these three essays shows how the values of liberal Protestantism and American democracy were both entangled and mapped onto black religious practices in the context of the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, respectively. Together, these articles reveal Phylon to be a publication where religion was given due and detailed consideration even as the journal participated in the privileging of a reason-ing, democratic (Afro) Protestantism as paradigmatic for modern black life. Phylon was launched in the midst of World War II. Although the chronological boundaries of this essay are drawn roughly in 1945, Atlanta University’s new “Review of Race and Culture” took fuller shape during the postwar period. In addition to coinciding with the war’s end in 1945, this early period was also significant because W. E. B. Du Bois served as editor in chief during these years. His imprint was, unsurprisingly, all

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over Phylon’s launch and would remain central at least until his forced retirement from Atlanta University in 1944.23 Yet to note Du Bois’s leadership and abiding influence is not to attribute responsibility to him for all that appeared in the pages of Phylon. The same sort of range that was represented on the editorial board he assembled was apparent in the work that appeared in the journal. Indeed, Phylon published research by scholars from a range of disciplines, spanning the humanities and social sciences, who wrote on a wide range of subjects, represented a range of political ideologies, and worked at a variety of institutions.

Edward Nelson Palmer and the Christianizing of the Negro One such person was Edward Nelson Palmer, who pursued doctoral studies under renowned sociologist Guy Johnson at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Before earning his Ph.D. in 1945, and as an assistant to Johnson, Palmer authored an essay on black secret societies for Gunnar Myrdal’s classic study of race in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).24 However, prior to establishing himself as a scholar of black fraternal organizations, he had written a master’s thesis on the prominent black preacher and radio broadcaster Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux. Palmer classified Michaux’s church as an unorthodox “religious sect” that amounted to little more than “institutionalized dancing crowds.”25 If Michaux’s ministry represented the margins, Palmer was no less interested in the mainstream of black religious life. For example, during the early 1940s he also published an essay that examined “the religious life of the Negro” as part and parcel of the making of American history. When Edward Palmer’s essay “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro” appeared in Phylon in 1944, he had not yet completed his Ph.D. He had, however, already joined the sociology faculty at Fisk University in Tennessee, which was then chaired by noted black sociologist Charles S. Johnson. Palmer’s basic argument was that an effective way to measure how well black people were adapting to American society was to examine the degree to which they had embraced Christianity. As a work of historical sociology, his narrative was organized into three major

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­ eriods, and, as a whole, the article might otherwise have been ­titled p “The Christianization of the Negro.” The first era that Palmer examined was the period prior to the American Revolution. Here he focused on the familiar debate over whether slaves who embraced Christianity ought to be emancipated. Otherwise put, did conversion necessitate manumission? In Palmer’s telling this moment was to be understood as the age of Anglican catechesis. He noted that few among the enslaved converted under these terms, although, Palmer observed, those who did were “thorough(ly) grounded in the fundamentals of Christian faith.”26 The next period under discussion spanned from 1740 until the end of U.S. chattel slavery. Most importantly for Palmer, this era included both the first and second Great Awakening. Here, he explained, a faith promulgated through the mastery of certain sacred texts gave way to the rise (and triumph) of an evangelical experientialism. In short, the Anglicans had been outdone by the Baptists and Methodists. Under these terms, the number of slaves who converted to Christianity dramatically increased. However, a shift in emphasis from catechesis to personal experience meant that a quantitative advance came at the expense of a qualitative decline. Christian salvation, Palmer argued, was no longer indicative of acculturation in the same way that it was under the rules of catechism. Palmer’s third and final period began where slavery ended, following black religious life from Emancipation until the contemporary moment in which the author penned his essay. Palmer posited, in this instance, that black Christian experience had begun to take on greater institutional form. He offered the spread of i­ndependent black churches—primarily Baptist and Methodist d ­ enominations—as evidence that Christianity had become “a normal function of Negro life.” Moreover, this was a sign that the goal of acculturation was not lost because, he claimed, “these denominations are conventional in every respect.” By this Palmer meant that black denominations displayed no substantive difference from their white Baptist and Methodist counterparts. Ultimately, Palmer’s account of black religious life advanced the idea that the growth of Afro-Protestant institutional life facilitated the cultivation of shared American civic virtues even as black and white Christian churches remained divided by the dictates of Jim Crow segregation. The numerical and institutional growth of Black

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Christianity was indicative of a black embrace of American culture despite the fact that white Americans, Christian or otherwise, refused to embrace their fellow Christians across “the color line” as full citizens. While black denominations showed signs of flourishing, Palmer noted that African Americans continued to lag behind in “other phases of religious life.” He pointed to “excessive emotionalism,” “frequent schizms,” and the “lack of an adequately trained ministry” as examples of such underdevelopment.27 In this regard, his critique of black denominational churches was similar to his diagnosis of Elder Michaux’s ministry. Yet emotionalism, schisms, and lack of education were key attributes of the long history of American Christianity in general. And Palmer took pains to clarify as much. Given the prominence of Melville Herskovits’s work on African cultural “retentions” in the Americas, Palmer explained that these qualities were not the result of a “peculiar negro temperament” or “a survival of African customs.” Rather than a sign of cultural distinctiveness, they were evidence of “incomplete acculturation.” These were the “usual marks of a developing social institution” and could also be ­observed in an “earlier phase in the religious behavior of white Americans.”28 Ultimately, for Palmer, Christianization was synonymous with Americanization, even if the nation failed to recognize black churches as such. Acculturation was the desired goal, and the Christianizing process was not yet complete.

Effie Lee Newsome and the Making of an Afro-Protestant Caribbean Nation If Palmer’s essay offered an analysis of Afro-Protestantism as an assessment of the Americanization of black people in the United States, then Effie Lee Newsome’s essay “Early Figures in Haitian Methodism” was a celebration of missionaries, martyrs, and the making of black Methodism in the Caribbean. If here a hagiographer, Newsome was better known within the context of the Harlem Renaissance. With degrees from Wilberforce, Oberlin, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania, she found work as both a writer and editor. Newsome published more than a hundred poems in The Crisis over two

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decades, while Du Bois was at its helm, and she edited a column for him during the 1920s.29 She also illustrated children’s literature and edited a children’s column in Opportunity. Newsome was the daughter of the ­Reverend Benjamin Franklin Lee, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and in 1920 she wed an AME preacher, the Reverend Henry Nesby Newsome.30 After some time in Birmingham, Alabama, the couple eventually moved to Ohio, and she found work as a  librarian. Across these multiple contexts, Newsome spent much of her  life in service to the AME Church, the first independent black denomination. Palmer’s account of Afro-Protestantism presented a sociology of “culture contact,” in which matters of theology were inconsequential. Christianity, in this view, was a proxy for citizenship and democracy. By contrast, Newsome’s article was an example of history lent in service to a claim for “good religion.”31 Her narrative of religious life in the republic of Haiti was also, at least in part, a lay discourse on toleration. In this view, the first independent black nation in the western hemisphere was an early experiment in religious diversity. However, embedded within her portrait of Haiti, Newsome provided a strident critique of how pluralism was practiced in the former French colony. In her estimation, ­toleration was a virtue that Catholics publicly claimed, but one by which Methodists actually abided. Newsome’s real story, then, was about ­Methodist faithfulness in the face of Catholic (and state) persecution. Haiti’s religious history provided Newsome with a platform on which to stage the familiar drama of cosmic struggle between good religion (i.e., Methodism) and bad religion (i.e., Catholicism). In this rendition, an embattled minority of Protestant believers who were “consecrated solely to God” fought off the “surrounding practices” of “a region in which worship meant ceremony.” These early Methodists on the island were a “creed-bound people” struggling in a nation where imprisonment, stonings, and “sectarian surveillance” were social rituals that maintained the order of a “Catholic world.” Even still, hope was not lost for Newsome’s pioneering Haitian Methodists. Hers was a tale of triumph for those who proclaimed “the gospel that the true shrine is the heart.” Though Catholicism presently occupied the center, in the form of ­proximity to state power in Haiti, Newsome imagined a future “when

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those idols are taken away and the gospel [is] preached in its purity.” In the meantime, she explained, “Persecutions from man and compassion from God formed the daily portion of these forerunners of the faith.”32 In this vein, Newsome enumerated the deeds of the black fathers of a Haitian pan-Methodist alliance, including Sipio Beans, “the first representative of Negro Methodism to die on foreign soil.”33 Along the way, she subtly wove together a larger set of debates about toleration and pluralism, and anti-Catholicism, and, in doing so, offered a telling illustration of how Protestantism sets the normative terms of (black) religion in the modern world. Phylon’s social-scientific and historical engagements with religion, as seen in the work of Newsome and Palmer, elevated a strand of Protestantism—one that privileged an autonomous, reasoning black subject—as a means into the modern and the Americas. Institutional Afro-Protestantism, along with individual believers, was figured favorably in contrast to the emotional and the oppressive excesses associated with American revivalism and Haitian Catholicism, respectively.

René Maran and the Contours of a Catholic Black Imaginary As much as their essays were both about the making of black religious life in the New World, Newsome and Palmer attended to different geographic contexts and were guided by differing disciplinary conventions. On one hand, Palmer decried sectarianism and denied Africanisms at a moment that scholars were shedding new light on both the African influences and (what were then perceived to be) the heterodox fringes of black faith in the United States. Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and Arthur Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis (1944), respectively, were exemplary in this regard.34 Newsome’s article, on the other hand, offered a polemic against “popery” just when black Americans, on the heels of urban migration, were beginning to join the Catholic Church in greater numbers. In this regard, both essays appeared to be out of step with an era that witnessed the development of a more expansive notion of Judeo-­Christianity, which was facilitated by international military contests and cultural connections and that reshaped the nation’s religious identity.35

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Rather than a crude anti-Catholicism or a crass Americanism, both authors’ arguments were indicative of a broader argument that aligned black religion with “The Negro Church.” And this singular proposition, as shorthand for an otherwise unwieldy array of black Protestant churches, was cast as an institution made in the image of American (read: white) Christianity writ large.36 This liberal religious vision even made allowances for the inclusion of Catholics as part of a growing Judeo-­ Christian sensibility. Yet this was true only insofar as Catholicism could be (re)presented—in contrast to the Roman excesses observed by Newsome—as consistent with the liberal values associated with Protestantism and American democracy. Such logics were seemingly apparent in black life, in the United States and abroad, and could be found on the pages of Phylon. In fact, the journal’s inaugural issue also featured an ­extended essay by René Maran in which an image and story of Afro-­Catholicism, notably overseas, took center stage. Translated from French to English by Romance language scholar and Phylon editorial board member W. Mercer Cook, “René Maran Looks at the Negro in France” is perhaps best classified as a work of travel literature.37 Maran was a renowned Francophone novelist from Martinique. In 1921 he received France’s most prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize, for his novel Batoula: A True Black Novel. By 1940 Maran had authored a biography of the nineteenth-century Methodist missionary to Africa, David Livingstone. He had also served as a colonial officer to Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic).38 His Phylon essay began with general observations about black life in France at the beginning of the 1940s. It ended with Maran’s reflections on an interview that he conducted with the Most Reverend Joseph Kiwanuka, who had recently become the first native-born African prelate in the Roman Catholic Church. With his consecration as bishop, Kiwanuka quickly ­became the most prominent black son of the Catholic order of the White Fathers, which had long been involved in missionary work on the continent. As has already been noted, what Phylon published concerning religion at this time tended to take for granted, and even privilege, a Protestant norm. Yet the journal’s first number also featured an image of black Catholicism, including a full-page photo of Bishop Kiwanuka. ­Maran’s

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rather celebratory essay on the “Vicar Apostolic of Masaka, Uganda,” was indicative of how interpretations of (black) American culture and (African) Catholicism were animated by a patriotic commitment to both democracy and (religious) pluralism. Such arguments also reflected a specific set of international political concerns occasioned by World War II even as they evinced the larger (and temporally longer) Christian logics that reimagined religion under the sign of the modern.39 Maran’s narration of his initial arrival at the bishop’s quarters in France was, on one hand, consonant with standing caricatures of both African culture and ethnic Catholicism, the kind of hyperemotionalism and ritualism decried in Palmer’s and Newsome’s essays. Upon entrance, his description of the “little museum of Negro art . . . [with] the rarest and strangest amulets, all undeniable and authentic,” faintly echoed the esteemed founder of French sociology, Émile Durkheim.40 In his obvious ambivalence, Maran marked these objects as simultaneously other and real. Indeed, it was their alterity that verified their authenticity. These were artifacts of African material culture, decidedly primitive remnants of the localized rituals of premodern “folk” cultures. Yet, now, they had been made safe by virtue of their removal from the rhythms of real time. Placing them on display in a “little museum” in the bishop’s Catholic quarters, in effect, secured their secularized status as “art.” That is, by moving them from the realm of religion (although still in close ­proximity) to the arts, these relics were remade as modern.41 Maran’s overall tone in presenting his time with the bishop was sober yet celebratory. He praised the Catholic Church for its recent consecration of four “colored” bishops: two Indian and two African, including Kiwanuka. Moreover, he interpreted this act as evidence of racial egalitarianism and as representative of the best and truest form of Catholicism. According to Maran, the church’s commitment to racial equality—as confirmed by these new bishops—also helped to explain anti-Catholic sentiments in Nazi Germany. “Hitler attacks the Church so bitterly in Mein Kampf,” he explained, “for ‘preaching the evangelical doctrine ­successfully to Hottentots and Kaffirs.’”42 Here the author’s arguments would have struck a familiar chord with Phylon’s largely American readership, as the Double V campaign framed fascism, in general, through a racial lens. In this view, the Third Reich was placed alongside Jim Crow

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segregation in the United States as an unjust social order. Both were obstacles to achieving true democracy. That Maran made a clear connection between “the ravings of Hitlerism and the excesses of racists” perhaps helps to explain why Phylon’s editorial team—which otherwise seemed much more interested in Protestant churches and their leaders—opted to include the essay in the journal’s inaugural edition.43 In this context, Bishop Kiwanuka was positioned as a prime example of how an institution could move concretely toward racial equality. And this was at a time when racial tensions flared between black Americans and ethnic Catholics, often turning violent as the Great Migration brought them into closer contact, under the terms of economic competition, in cities across the United States.44 In addition to connecting the dots between fascism and segregation, Maran also took the occasion of his interview with Bishop Kiwanuka to make a larger claim concerning the Catholic Church in particular and Christianity writ large. First, he praised Pope Pius XI for his leadership in developing and establishing the encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae, which in 1926 made the “building up of a native clergy” a Catholic priority.45 Although the encyclical addressed the issue of “Catholic Missions” in general, it also laid the groundwork within the Catholic Church for Pope Pius XII to consecrate Kiwanuka as the first African bishop thirteen years later.46 Such Catholic advances—calling for and then consecrating clergy across the lines of color, caste and colonialism—were part of “the great work of Christian colonization and of spiritual civilization.” According to Maran, the consecration of these first four “colored” bishops was ­“consistent with the great and true Christian tradition.” Bishop Ki­ wanuka was, in short, the embodiment of “the most important spiritual victory of modern times.”47 Maran’s presentation of Catholicism exemplified a way of reading religion, more generally, through the measures of race politics. The Catholic Church was figured here, for Phylon’s readers, as significant insofar as it was a model of an institutional Christianity committed to racial equality. Indeed, the idea that racial democracy was the test of “true Christianity” continued to appear on the pages of Phylon well beyond its first issue, as seen in the essays by Newsome, Palmer, and others. Celebrating the Most Reverend Joseph Kiwanuka’s ascent into the Church’s

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hierarchy was consistent with the broader aims and aspirations of black artists and intellectuals during the early 1940s. Kiwanuka’s Catholicism— in contrast to Phylon’s Anglo and Protestant orthodoxy—pointed to the primary form of Christianity shared by a growing network and movement (i.e., Negritude) of black writers, such as Maran, who had been educated in missionary schools across the Francophone African diaspora.48 At the same time, the idea of locating a democratic commitment within the Roman Catholic Church coalesced well with American interests abroad at the time, which helped facilitate the forging of a Judeo-­ Christian identity and alliance during the war. Ultimately, presenting such an image to Phylon’s largely American readership helped connect the dots for a growing black internationalism.49

Pluralism, Protestantism, and the Politics of Phylon If Maran’s profile of Bishop Kiwanuka (and his portrait of “the church”) suggested a role for Christianity in the struggle for racial equality, then William Stanley Braithwaite carried this vision of a democratic faith into the realm of the arts. A member of the journal’s editorial board and a professor at Atlanta University, by 1940 Braithwaite was one of the most esteemed Negro literary figures. In 1918 he had won the NAACP’s ­Spingarn Medal, and he was a regular contributor to leading publications such as the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and New Republic. His writing had also been included in most of the premier black anthologies of the preceding decades, including James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and The Negro Caravan (1940), edited by Sterling Brown, Ulysses Lee, and Arthur Davis. Braithwaite’s poem “Ascension” also appeared in the first issue of Phylon, on the page immediately before a photograph of Bishop Kiwanuka. To recall, in his portrait of Kiwanuka Maran subtly invoked the primary site of the art world—that is, the museum—to (re)present artifacts of African traditional religions.50 Here, similarly, Braithwaite’s poem epitomized the sort of aestheticized (and secularized) religiosity that ­garnered a significant degree of spiritual authority in the decades after

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World War I occasioned a crisis of meaning for institutional Christianity.51 Both men refigured religious phenomena on aesthetic terms, and thus as distinctly modern. The politics of studying religion at Phylon, in general, was consistent with how a liberal religious sensibility reimagined traditional Christian theology in light of the novel authorities of the arts and (social) sciences.52 For the journal’s primarily American audience, as seen in articles by Newsome and Palmer, this often took the form of privileging an institutional and ethical (Afro)Protestantism imagined in the image of democracy, whether in the United States or the Caribbean. This modern view of religion was constrained by a normative North American Protestantism even as it was filtered through the prism of an increasingly international political order. As such, it was capacious enough even to abide Catholicism (i.e., Maran on Kiwanuka), with the key provision being that Catholicism was understood as consistent with the aims and ends of a democratic social order. “Ascension” celebrated the most universal of virtues even as it asked the timeless question of which virtue was most important. “Wisdom or Beauty, Power or Grace?,” the poet queried. In this view, the arts were granted the air of catholicity alongside qualities. The poem’s title also illustrated how well an undefined idea of spiritual ascent resonated with an uplift ideology during a moment of lofty black aspirations. In their “Apology,” Phylon’s editors neatly wove together the arts and sciences, elevating “the scientific value of the creative impulse.”53 “Ascension” offered a literary example that was entirely in keeping with such sentiments. To the point, it was an occasion where poetry was lent in service to the authority of reason and science. Better yet, Braithwaite’s verse suggested a rapprochement between beauty and wisdom on spiritual terms: O Beauty, in whose spirit lives The majestic triumphs Wisdom gives.54 The poet positioned wisdom and beauty as sites of veneration. Science and art were, ultimately, quite similar to “mystic searchings.”55 William Brathwaite wove together, in verse, the modern discourses of science and religion through the ancient archetype of divine wisdom. Phylon, more generally, was not simply an academic exercise in racial uplift. As a review of race and culture, the journal published dispas­sionate

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social-science research directed to address race problems and literature (and literary analysis) that was guided by normative claims regarding the (spiritual) maturation of black culture. In this way, the journal’s visions of both race and religion bore the tensions between descriptive and prescriptive concerns that animated the novel theories of cultural pluralism from which it took cues. Braithwaite’s verse, specifically, appealed to the idea of “apocryphal” status, noting a movement from “mystic searchings” to scientific knowledge. In this way, his poem located black life, more generally, within a teleology of historical progress from religion to reason. Even still, Phylon’s brand of racial science was enlivened by religious ambitions that took the forms of scholarly intervention and aesthetic performance. In both cases, ultimately, the politics of studying religion at Phylon enunciated an ecumenical vision for making “straight the path to a common world humanity” that simultaneously adhered to and maintained the boundaries of a very familiar liberal Protestantism.

Notes 1.  David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2.  For a discussion of the Atlanta University publication series, see chapter 9 in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Holt, 1994), 211–37. 3.  David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). They would eventually enlist (outsourced in the interest of objectivity) an “objective” outsider in Gunnar Myrdal to document the United States’ race problem. 4.  Rayford Logan, African American National Biography; Kenneth Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African-American Intellectual (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); August Meir and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). See more at Malik Simba, “Rayford W. Logan (1897–1982),” Black Past, January 1, 2007, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/logan-rayford-1897-1982 #sthash.50J0Drp5.dpuf. 5.  Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 6.  Editorial Board, “Apology,” Phylon 1, no. 1 (First Quarter 1940): 3–5.

74  Josef Sorett 7.  Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 89. 8.  Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 9. Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 91. See also Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013), 5–6; Adam Green, Selling the Race. 10.  David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 142–213. 11.  Editorial Board, “Apology,” 5. The editors’ repeated use of the term ­abolish is a clear reference to slavery and what the editors understood to be the significance of this institution in shaping the primary economic problems of the twentieth century. 12. Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 55–56. In the aftermath of World War II, international encounters across the lines of cultural (racial and religious) difference also took the form of the fledgling publication Holiday, which recast the conversation on the terms of tourism. See Michael Callahan, “A Holiday for the Jet Set,” Vanity Fair, April 11, 2013. For a longer history of the spiritual visions occasioned by encounters, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 13.  William H. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010); Race and Human Rights discourse as two related trajectories on the protestant-secular continuum. A similar ethical and theological vision, with a distinctly Protestant past, took public pronouncement and institutional form in human rights discourses advanced during the same decade. 14.  Editorial Board, “Apology,” 3. 15.  Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4. 16.  Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, eds., After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–30. 17.  Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12. 18.  Barbara Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

“The answers were apocryphal!”  75 19. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 20. Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us. 21.  Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6. 22.  Editorial Board, “Apology,” 3. 23.  David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Holt, 2009), 642–47. Du Bois’s retirement is also acknowledged in the journal itself. See “Persons and Places,” Phylon 5 (1944): 279. 24.  “News and Notes,” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (November 1956): 332. 25.  Edward Nelson Palmer, Elder Michaux and His Church of God: A Sociological Interpretation, section 3, row 6, box 6, folder 5, Fisk University Library. 26.  Edward Nelson Palmer, “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro,” Phylon 5, no. 3 (Third Quarter, 1944): 61. 27.  Palmer, “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro,” 265. 28.  Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990; first published 1941); Palmer, “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro,” 264–65. 29. Ventria Patton and Maureen Honey, eds., Double-Take: A Revisionist ­Harlem Renaissance Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 243. 30.  Katherine Capshaw Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Nesby pastored St. John AME Church in Birmingham, and he taught and served as dean at Greater Payne University; 283n29. 31.  Effie Lee Newsome, “Early Figures in Haitian Methodism,” Phylon 4, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1944): 51–61. Newsome’s privileging of Methodism over Catholicism is consistent with Robert Orsi’s account of how the field of religious studies contributed to a discourse on good and bad religion in the United States; Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 171. 32.  Newsome, “Early Figures in Haitian Methodism,” 55. 33. Ibid. 34.  Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 35.  K. Healon Gaston, “Interpreting Judeo-Christianity in America,” Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 2, no. 2 (2012): 291–304; Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65–85. For an example of how this Judeo-Christian sensibility

76  Josef Sorett ­infused African American culture, see chapter 3 of Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 36. Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, 1–19. 37.  René Maran, Monsignor Kiwanuka, and W. Mercer Cook, “An Interview with Monsignor Kiwanuka, Bishop of Massaka,” Phylon 1, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1940): 31–35. 38.  Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 69. The same year that Mercer Cook translated Maran’s profile in Phylon, he also authored an essay on Maran in the Journal of Negro History. See Mercer Cook, “The Literary Contribution of the French West Indian,” Journal of Negro History 25, no. 4 (1940): 520–30. 39.  Here I mean to suggest Maran’s presentation of Kiwanuka as an example reflects both the specific context of World War II and the longer Christian history of the category of religion. My thinking in this regard is informed by Talal Asad; see chapter 1 of his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 40.  Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). 41.  Brent S. Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2004). 42.  Maran, Kiwanuka, and Cook, “An Interview with Monsignor Kiwanuka, Bishop of Massaka,” 32. 43.  Ibid., 33. 44.  For two helpful treatments of race and American Catholicism, see John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-­ Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 45.  Rerum Ecclesiae, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Catholic Missions to our Venerable Brethren, the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See, February 28, 1926. 46.  Joseph Kiwanuka was consecrated bishop on May 25, 1939. 47.  Maran, Kiwanuka, and Cook, “An Interview with Monsignor Kiwanuka, Bishop of Massaka,” 35. 48.  For a book that is attentive to the significance of Catholicism for Negri­ tude, see Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 49.  Gaston, “Interpreting Judeo-Christianity in America”; Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (66) (Spring 2001): 45–73.

“The answers were apocryphal!”  77 50.  Elayne Olyphant, “Beyond Blasphemy or Devotion: Art, the Secular, and Catholicism in Paris,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21: 352–73. 51.  Giles Gunn, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 52.  See Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. 53.  Editorial Board, “Apology,” 3–5. 54.  William Stanley Braithwaite, “Ascension,” Phylon 1, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1940): 54–55. 55.  Braithwaite, “Ascension,” 54. It also recalls the sort of sacred value attributed to literacy that Du Bois once described as “cabbalistic,” a form of esoteric knowledge that Black people pursued with religious fervor in the aftermath of Emancipation. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 8.

CHAPTER 4

“The fulness of the earth is yours” Environmental Politics in the Mormon Culture Region Pa t r i c k Q . M a s o n ★

In the past half century, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or Mormons, have emerged as one of the most reliably conservative cultural and political blocs in the United States, with the hue of Utah’s electoral politics approximately matching that of its famous red rocks. The LDS Church has made waves in recent decades for throwing its weight behind conservative positions on the Equal Rights Amendment, alcohol and gambling laws, same-sex marriage, and religious freedom legislation, both domestically and internationally. At the same time, the church has surprised many by taking a centrist and even progressive stance on immigration policy and nondiscrimination laws related to housing and employment. Though of minimal demographic significance east of the Rockies, in the Intermountain West and sometimes California Mormons exert considerable political and cultural influence, especially when they become mobilized around a particular issue. Political scientists David Campbell, John Green, and Quin Monson have referred to the Latter-day Saint political community as “dry ­kindling” that needs only a well-placed spark from its church leaders to produce massive amounts of energy. The most dramatic example of this 78

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came in 2008 in the debate over California Proposition 8, a state constitutional ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage. The LDS Church had been actively involved in earlier efforts to prohibit gay marriage in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere but saw the 2008 contest as a bellwether requiring maximum attention. The church’s top governing body, called the First Presidency, sent a letter that was read in the Sunday worship services of every Latter-day Saint congregation in California in June 2008, encouraging church members to “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.” For the church, this was not about politics per se but rather a battle “to preserve the sacred institution of marriage.”1 ­Mobilized by the church’s regional and local ecclesiastical leadership, Latter-day Saints responded in force, donating upwards of $20 million and constituting up to 90 percent of the volunteers who did door-todoor canvassing for the campaign—this despite being only about 2 percent of the state population. When the proposition passed with a scant majority, many observers credited (or blamed) Mormon mobilization as a deciding factor. One of the key insights of Campbell, Green, and Monson, however, is that the political flammability of the Latter-day Saint community is in large part a result of the leadership’s infrequent calls to  action. Thus, “when Mormons do receive political direction from Church leaders, it gets their attention.”2 This paradox of Latter-day Saint political mobilization, in which the community is poised to galvanize on a particular political issue but rarely does, is demonstrated aptly by twentieth-century environmental politics in the American West. In some respects one would expect the Saints, given their numbers in the region, to be active participants in what at times has been a raucous debate over policies regarding water rights, land use, and federal land management. Yet while a number of individual Latter-day Saints have been outspoken in these debates, for the most part the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an institution has remained silent. This is not for the lack of a theological impulse—indeed, Mormonism has rich internal resources for a robust environmental ­theology and ethic that rivals or in some ways exceeds what can be found in other Christian traditions, and which presumably

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could be mobilized in the service of environmental political activism. Yet the LDS Church has never identified care for the environment as a “moral issue” on par with abortion, gambling and alcohol, gay marriage, and religious ­freedom—the issues that merited direct church statements and even more active forms of political involvement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It would not be correct to conclude that Latter-day Saints have been completely silent on environmental issues, but it is fair to say that the LDS Church has remained neutral in conflicts between environmental, conservationist, and business development interests—this despite the fact that many of those conflicts have played out in the Intermountain West, the church’s own backyard and the area of its greatest demographic strength and political influence. Some have criticized the church for its relative silence, while others, including some Latter-day Saint environmentalists, have seen the church’s unwillingness to enter the fray as appropriate. For instance, George Handley, one of the most widely published contemporary ­Mormon environmentalists, has lamented the fact “that so many environ­ mental issues have become political, seemingly unnecessary.” He con­ tinued, “Maybe we have become too accustomed to looking to institutions and political processes for answers when we should instead look to ourselves. Perhaps a ground-level, faith-based practice of good stewardship will be helpful in reducing unnecessary polarization and, more importantly, in producing more fruitful and sustainable practices.”3 Whether Handley’s grassroots theory of change is indeed the most effective approach to tackling the enormous ecological challenges we face in this century, both his articulation of the root problem (politicization and polarization) and his proposed solution (individuals practicing good stewardship based on deeply held beliefs) capture much of the dynamics of Latter-day Saint thinking about the environment. The articulation of a Latter-day Saint environmental ethic has been episodic but persistent since the early years of the movement and has been advanced by some of its most prominent leaders. This ethic was primarily rooted in Joseph Smith’s revelations as well as the nineteenth-­ century Mormon encounter in and with the American West, and especially the Great Basin, as a place reserved by God for his people to build up his kingdom on earth. The land was special, even sacred in a way, in

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part simply because it was God’s creation but even more so because it was consecrated as a home for God’s people. The Latter-day Saints’ unique book of scripture, the Book of Mormon, referred to a “land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands,” which the Saints interpreted to be America. It was a chosen land, set apart by God for his people to establish his covenant and keep his commandments.4 Successively driven from their communities in Ohio, Missouri, and then Illinois, and after settling in Utah, the Latter-day Saints tended to focus less on America and more on their newfound desert home as the promised land. Brigham Young remarked in 1856, “We have been hunting during the past twenty-six years [since the church’s organization in 1830], for a place where we could raise Saints, not merely wheat, and corn.” Now they had found it, and he proclaimed Utah “a first-rate place to raise Saints.”5 Young’s sentiments about Utah being a good place were a particular expression of a broader Mormon cosmology: namely, that God created the earth as a place for his children to come and gain bodies, knowledge, and experience, all of which would prepare them for eternal life. This earth, Mormons learned from one of Smith’s early revelations, “is ordained for the use of man.”6 Another revelation continues on the theme: the fulness of the earth is yours[,] the beasts of the field & the fowls of the air & that which climbeth upon trees and walketh upon the earth[;] yea & the herb & the good things which cometh of the earth . . . yea all things which cometh of the earth . . . [are] made for the benefit & the use of man both to please the eye & to glad[d]en the heart[;] yea for food & for raiment[,] for taste & for smell[,] to strengthen the body & to enliven the soul[. And] it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man[;] for unto this end were they made to be used with judgement not to excess neither by extortion.7 We see here some of the building blocks of a Mormon environmental theological ethic.8 “The fulness of the earth,” with all its ecological diversity, is not only commended to the stewardship of humans but ex­ plicitly provided to enhance the human experience. Even so, the earth’s

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resources are to be used prudentially, presumably in balanced fashion so as to preserve them for future generations as well as the overall health of the environment. Ecological “extortion,” which we might presume to be nonsustainable practices such as clear-cutting, strip-mining, and other harsh extractive techniques, is prohibited. While instrumentalized in the service of human flourishing, in Mormon theology the natural world is also imbued with inherent and even sacred dignity. In part, as is the case in other Abrahamic traditions, this is simply because creation emanates from God and thus reflects his being and image. Yet Mormons add another layer beyond the notion of providential creation. Latter-day Saints believe that just as humans have within them an eternal spirit, or a soul, so do all of God’s creations, both animate and inanimate. In Smith’s expansion of the Bible’s Book of Genesis, the earth literally groans under the weight of human violence, pollution, and wickedness and cries to God, “O Lord wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth?”9 Furthermore, in speaking of the depths of human immorality in the last days before the Second Coming of Christ, the Book of Mormon lists “great pollutions upon the face of the earth” alongside “murders, and robbing, and lying, and deceivings, and whoredoms, and all manner of abominations.”10 Anecdotally, Smith applied his own theology on a micro level when he “exhorted the brethren not to kill a serpent, bird, or an animal of any kind . . . unless it became necessary in order to preserve ourselves from hunger.”11 In Mormon thought, God grants the use of his creation to humans, who in turn act as stewards, not owners. As stewards, humans—and especially God’s chosen people, the Latter-day Saints—are not only to manage the earth’s resources “with judgment, not to excess,” as Smith’s revelation stated, but also are to make exertions to beautify and purify the “wilderness” that Adam and Eve had been cast into after their transgression in the Garden of Eden. Thus, nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints in Utah adopted as a sacred duty the irrigation and cultivation of land. As historian Leonard Arrington observed, “Making the waste places blossom as the rose, and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits, was more than an economic necessity; it was a form of religious worship. . . . Devices for converting arid wastes into green fields thus assumed an almost sacramental character.”12

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Nevertheless, while affirming humans’ sacred connection to the land and that all natural objects have an innate spirit, Mormon theology makes a crucial distinction: humans are the children of God, while everything else is a creation of God. While God cares for all his creations, humans have a privileged place not simply as the culmination of God’s handiwork, as depicted in the Genesis accounts in the Bible, but as literal children and thus heirs. Humans are stewards of the earth in time, but ultimately, as another of Smith’s revelations stated, “the Earth shall be given unto them for an inheritance.”13 In this regard Mormon theology is decidedly anthropocentric, with the earth as the stage for a human morality play. Latter-day Saint scripture is clear that God created the earth with the express intent of providing a place for humans to dwell and prove if they would keep God’s commandments.14 How the principal actors treat the stage—ideally “with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion”—is but one measure of the quality of their performance. This brief excursus into the foundations of a Mormon environ­ mental theology provides a framework for considering the intersections of religion, environment, and politics in one particular community in twentieth-century America. In this essay I will not construct a systematic history of Latter-day Saints’ relationship to the environment nor an environmental history of the Mormon culture region, typically defined as the area of predominant Mormon settlement stretching from southeastern Idaho through the I-15 corridor in Utah to northern Arizona, with additional outposts in places such as Cardston, Alberta.15 Instead, as an American religious historian with an interest in the political development of religious communities, I here explore twentieth-century Latter-­ day Saint environmental thought and politics as a case study of religious development as well as the simultaneous politicization of religious thought and sanctification of political ideology and cultural politics. My approach will be more episodic and illustrative than exhaustive. In the Latter-day Saint case, we see a religiously based environmental theology and ethic presented and interpreted, by church leaders and laity alike, as apolitical in the sense that it did not typically spawn direct political activism, but deeply political in the ways that it supported the development and maintenance of a particular political orientation or ethos. At the core of this ethos was the notion that individuals are to act

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morally in this world, to shape their character in such a way as to mimic and then embody godliness. While twentieth-century Latter-day Saints generally resisted what they perceived to be the atomistic and relativistic individualism at the heart of modern liberal social, political, and cultural arrangements, they affirmed that salvation (or rather, exaltation, in Latter-­day Saint parlance) is largely a matter of personal morality based on the free choice to comply with divine law. Responsibility, accountability, obedience, and unity were also the core values consistently embedded in Mormon discourse about the environment. Professed and actual fidelity to these values made Latter-day Saints feel right at home in twentieth-century American conservatism. Somewhat counterin­ tuitively, then, the more that twentieth-century Latter-day Saints spoke about the environment—particularly in the way they typically spoke about the environment—the more they reinforced their affinity with modern American conservative cultural and political discourse. As historians such as Leonard Arrington, Dean May, and Jared Farmer have demonstrated, the main concern for Mormons in settling the Great Basin was neither economic nor ecological, but rather the establishment and maintenance of a godly community.16 Some environmental scholars have mistakenly confused the Mormon emphasis on human moral progress and salvation with an inherent anti-­environmentalism. For instance, in his argument for how churches could lead the way in addressing the global ecological crisis, Max Oelschlaeger wrote that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is “the only denomination that has formally stated its opposition to ecology as part of the church’s mission.”17 Others have dismissively cited the church’s millennial expectations as a formidable and perhaps insurmountable obstacle to the development and application of a meaningful environmental ethic among Latter-day Saints.18 It is true that frontier Mormons cared about the state of the land more in relation to the state of their souls than for its own sake. Nineteenth-­century Latter-day Saint leaders encouraged industry and self-sufficiency but frowned upon any use of the land that privileged individual prosperity over the common good. Young railed against mining because of what it did to men’s character, not what it did to the earth; he preached, “Gold will sink a man to hell.”19 In fact, during the pioneer ­period of Utah history, when ecclesiastical and political leadership in the

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territory converged in the figure of Brigham Young, the Mormons “coupled an essentially optimistic attitude towards nature with the concept of stewardship as a theological basis for resource conservation.”20 This pioneer Mormon conservation ethic was always pragmatic at heart, predicated on the fact that most of the land in the Saints’ newfound home was too dry, rocky, salty, or steep to be used for agriculture. Fresh water and timber were available but not abundant. Thus, the lack of arable land forced church leaders—who doubled as civic leaders—to encourage prudent resource management and conservation. The leadership’s conservation message did not always take hold among the rank and file, whose skills with farming, livestock, and timber had been developed in dramatically different climates in the eastern United States and northern Europe.21 By 1865, less than twenty years after the first Mormons entered Salt Lake Valley, Apostle Orson Hyde lamented the Saints’ poor land management: “I find the longer we live in these valleys that the range is becoming more and more destitute of grass; the grass is not only eaten up by the great amount of stock that feed upon it, but they tramp it out by the very roots; and where grass once grew luxuriantly, there is now nothing but the desert weed, and hardly a spear of grass is to be seen.”22 The situation grew even worse over the course of the last third of the nineteenth century. As a result of the federal government’s punitive campaign against Mormon polygamy and theocracy in the 1870s and 1880s, Latter-day Saint leaders essentially renounced their role in dictating political and economic policy in Utah. Young’s communitarian vision, which had at least indirectly tried to protect natural resources through an ethic of limited use and conservation in the name of the common good, was replaced with the logic of the free market. Historian Thomas Alexander argues, “As they became more like other Euro-Americans, many Mormons began to interpret economic freedom as a license to savage the physical environment in their quest for wealth.”23 As a historical argument, then, it is plausible to contend that environmental degradation in the Great Basin occurred not because of but in spite of Latter-day Saint theology and ecclesiastical influence. The result of consistent overgrazing and overcutting was recurrent floods and landslides. Mountain watersheds become increasingly ­polluted

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or otherwise unusable. By the turn of the twentieth century, the environmental situation in Utah had become dire enough—with direct consequences for the human population—that a coalition of civic and religious leaders banded together to address the problems. Inspired by both the City Beautiful and City Practical movements, they combined conservation with urban planning to make substantial strides in promoting balanced land-management strategies and reducing water and air pollution. In general, their actions were inspired less by a deeply held environmental theology than a sense of self-interest, civic duty, and Progressive ideology.24 Though LDS Church leaders no longer dictated economic policy after Utah became a state in 1896, they did keep a close eye on developments and offered direct counsel to the Saints on environmental matters. For instance, in April 1902 the priesthood leadership of the church met in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. As they sheltered from a torrential thunderstorm, their conversation centered not on the mysteries of the Kingdom of God but the politics of water rights in Utah. Apostle John Henry Smith spoke of “the absolute necessity of our people controlling the water sheds,” a position echoed by his cousin and church president Joseph F. Smith. “Capitalists and sheep men” were buying up all the land near the rivers and irrigation ditches, and John Henry Smith argued that “the agricultural lands necessarily suffered in consequence.” Also in attendance was Reed Smoot, the LDS apostle whose election to the U.S. Senate the following year would trigger a four-yearlong Senate inquiry “on every peculiarity of Mormonism”—and who, once seated, became an ardent supporter of the federal conservation efforts of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, cosponsoring the 1916 National Park Service Organic Act. Smoot told the gathering that he “deplored the spirit of litigation that found place in the hearts of some of our people.” The real problem, in other words, was not overgrazing or overdevelopment, but the overheated feelings that the issues had provoked. In his short remarks on the subject, Brigham Young Jr., president of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and son of the vaunted pioneer prophet, made explicit the direct, causal relationship between the people’s morality and their physical environment. “As long as the spirit of union existed among the people the waters would increase and

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the land become more fertile,” he preached. “On the other hand, as the spirit of litigation increased the waters decreased and the land dete­ riorated.” He testified that “it was by union that the waters increased and not by court decrees,” finally warning that “the farms would dry up and  become dust only to be blown away if we became divided and contentious.”25 Watersheds, irrigation, and soil erosion were real concerns for the leaders of a people dependent on agriculture well into the twentieth century. Though church leaders clearly cared about what happened to water and land resources, strictly ecological concerns were secondary to the quality of the relationships among the people. Just as God had sent drought and famine to chasten the Egyptians and the Israelites in the Old Testament, so too would he work through the forces of nature to remind his latter-day followers of what mattered most. Their temporal relationship to the physical environment was a barometer of their more eternally significant relationships with one another and with their God. The wholeness of the land would be a reflection of the wholeness of the people. As was the case with most Americans into the twentieth century, and certainly most westerners, Latter-day Saints had a close relationship to the land precisely because they lived on it and worked it. Inspired by ­Joseph Smith’s revelations, the Saints often insisted that the land itself had redeeming qualities. A full century after Mormon settlement in Utah, Apostle John A. Widtsoe, an influential agronomist and former president of Utah State Agricultural College, articulated an agrarian ideal that would have made Thomas Jefferson proud: “We Latter-day Saints are a land-loving people. We believe in the land. We are a land-­ using people. . . . We Latter-day Saints must ever remember the sanctity and the holiness of the land given us by the Father. There is safety in the land.”26 A quarter century earlier, Widtsoe, who had been educated at Harvard and received his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen, Germany, submitted a report on irrigation to the premier of Alberta. It was the careful report of a scientist who was widely hailed as a leading expert in the field and who took seriously his commission to advise the government on “sound and dependable business practice.” But it also revealed

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the heart of a pastoral church leader who cared for the social and spiritual life of the people who would cultivate the land. In recommending an extensive investment in irrigation, Widtsoe observed that it would produce steady crop yields and steady people. An irrigation project would bring about “dense settlement,” thus enhancing opportunities for social life and encouraging farmers to establish “a home, set in an environment of trees, shrubs, flowers and kitchen gardens.” Such a program would advance the government’s aims of “colonization” in the semiarid areas in middle Canada: “It will help make Canada one country under continuous human conquest from ocean to ocean.” This Canadian manifest destiny would best be accomplished not by prospectors and speculators looking for quick profits, but rather by “young or middle-aged men with families” who would demonstrate “their willingness to sacrifice for some years to win a financial independence on the land.”27 Without saying as much, Widtsoe’s recommendation was essentially that the Canadian government should follow the lead of the Latter-day Saints in the model they applied to settling communities from the American Midwest to the Great Basin.28 The goal of agriculture was to support social life and a domestic ideal, not to produce great wealth (and despair) through the boom and bust cycles associated with dry farming. Regular crop rotation and diversification on a small farm would produce modest but steady returns, enough to support a family and, by extension, a community and then a nation. Properly managed, and used “with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion,” the land would serve well a hardworking people committed to financial independence and social cohesion. A human-centered view of the utility of the land and its resources coexisted comfortably in this view with a deeply spiritual vision of communion between humans and nature. Conceptually, it was a harmonious relationship in which humans lived off the land and in turn cultivated, beautified, and protected it for its own health, their enjoyment, and ­future use. A few weeks before Widtsoe died, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. Eisenhower tapped as his secretary of ­agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, one of Widtsoe’s colleagues in the LDS Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.29 Among Benson’s priorities during his eight years at the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture

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(USDA) were reducing chronic farm overproduction and massive surpluses, eliminating or limiting government-imposed price controls, stimu­lating agricultural research, and improving soil and water conservation.30 Although most of his day-to-day work was concerned with managing a sprawling government bureaucracy and negotiating agriculture policy and legislation with Congress, Benson saw his position as a calling from God and imbued his work with spiritual meaning. For instance, it was not uncommon for him to include passages from the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s revelations in his communications with Eisenhower.31 At the heart of his basic outlook were the values that he had learned as a boy in the small Mormon farming community of Whitney, Idaho. The norms of the Mormon village would shape Benson’s approach to federal agricultural policy and would be the basis for the gospel of work, personal responsibility, individual initiative, local control, spiritual values, land conservation, and human freedom that he preached in literally thousands of stump speeches delivered across the country and around the world during his tenure as USDA secretary. We can see in one plank of Benson’s policies the way that natural conservation and political conservatism blended for him, which would be indicative of a broader Mormon worldview that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. Under Benson’s leadership, the USDA invested heavily in education programs to help individual farmers learn more about soil and water conservation, allowing them to better manage the resources on their property for future generations. Benson traveled to every corner of the country sounding the call. In a series of speeches to groups such as the National Association of Soil Conservation Districts and the National Watershed Congress, Benson affirmed that his commitment to soil conservation stemmed from firsthand experience with “the enormous menace of erosion” in his home valley in southern Idaho. “Still fresh in my memory,” he shared, “are the disastrous floods that time and again wrought havoc with the canal systems and buried whole farms under sterile debris.” He urged his listeners “to look ahead as far as we can” when making decisions about how to use the land. The federal government would do all it could to support farmers in their conservation efforts, but ultimately the viability and long-term success of the program would depend on “local responsibility and leadership,” from “the

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millions of good decisions on individual farms and in thousands of local com­munities that add up to progress.” Finally, he said, the program “must be more than just conservation for conservation’s sake.” He emphasized that “the end purpose of conservation is not just the welfare of the land, but the welfare of the people.”32 Benson’s environmental ethic was one of personal responsibility, local control, common sense, and the priority of human needs considered both in the present and for future generations. Upon leaving the cabinet, Benson argued that his political conservatism and agricultural conservationism were cut from the same cloth: “The two just naturally go together,” he affirmed. “The conservationist seeks to preserve, develop and improve the natural resources of soil, water, minerals and timber that made and that keep this country materially rich. The conservative seeks to preserve, develop, and improve the political resources that made and keep this country free.” He seemed genuinely surprised that “the same people who praise my conservationism as forward-looking and courageous criticize my conservatism as  backward-looking and timid,” responding, “I’m the same man in either case.”33 Though Benson’s conservationist impulses and policies would put him at odds with preservationists and later environmentalists, his views would place him in broad agreement with the “antistatist environmentalists” studied by Brian Allen Drake. Like Barry Goldwater and wide swaths of the postwar American middle class, Benson genuinely loved the natural environment of his western homeland. As a federal administrator he had taken positive steps to conserve natural resources and ­prevent erosion, deforestation, and various forms of pollution. But for Benson, as Drake wrote of Goldwater, “his passion for the natural world often clashed with his ideology, waxing and waning with particular issues and the broader environmental and political context in which they arose. There was constant tension between Goldwater’s [or Benson’s] environmental values on the one hand and his anti-statism on the other, especially his support for unfettered capitalism and his fears of federal power.”34 Unshackled by the compromises inherent in heading a federal bureaucracy in the Eisenhower administration, Benson became more ex-

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plicitly political and more fiercely conservative upon leaving the cabinet. He became an outspoken advocate for—though never officially a member of—the John Birch Society and gained national prominence as a spokesman for the hard-right politics of the era. (In 1968 he was recruited to make a nonpartisan run for the presidency, with Strom Thurmond as his running mate; when those plans fell through, George Wallace tried but ultimately failed to recruit Benson to join his ticket.) All the while, he continued to serve as an apostle within the LDS Church. This is significant because, although Benson was a staunch supporter and ally of Goldwater’s throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his views on the environment were far more moralistic and religious than Goldwater’s more secular and aesthetic approach. Especially by the 1970s, Benson’s environmental discourse sounded less like early to mid-twentieth-century conservationism and more like the rhetoric of nineteenth-century Mormon pioneer leaders. Ecological degradation was both real and dangerous, he believed, but importantly mostly as a barometer of the people’s moral decay. The environment would be protected not by federal regulation, which took away human freedom, but only with widespread in­ dividual repentance and moral reform, which would include a more balanced approach to stewardship over God’s creation. In the wake of the burgeoning environmentalist movement in the 1970s, Benson argued that the world’s ecological challenges were not nearly as serious as the “disorders and malfunctionings” in the body politic and culture that produced a host of social and moral ills. At a regional forum convened by the White House in 1975 to review priorities in domestic policy, Benson delivered an unforgiving jeremiad. Most of the lengthy address spoke to explicitly political and economic issues, but then he turned his gaze toward the swelling movement to save the earth. “Those who undertake the task of alerting their fellowmen with regard to physical ecology without also paying heed to spiritual laws have undertaken an impossible task,” he thundered. He quoted from one of Joseph Smith’s revelations: “For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I [God] prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.” For his gloss on the scripture Benson cited Brigham Young, who taught, “Everything we have has been bestowed upon us for our action, to see what we would do with it.” In

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other words, the problem was not that the world God created could not sustain an expanding human population (all of whom were, after all, God’s children, destined to come to the earth), but rather whether humans would respond morally to the providential gift of creation.35 Benson expressed concern over “scarred landscapes that cause floods and leave an economic emptiness that haunts the coming generations.” But just as disastrous was the onslaught of “unchastity,” which “leaves terrible scars, brings floods of tears and anguish, and leaves moral emptiness.” The root problem of environmental degradation and moral degradation was the same: “both imprudent strip-mining and unchastity rest on a life-style that partakes of an ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ philosophy— gouge and grab now without regard to the consequences. Both negligent strip-mining and unchastity violate the spirit of stewardship over our planet and person.” If the diagnosis to environmental and moral degradation was identical, then so was the solution, according to Benson: individuals taught and then acting upon correct principles. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would urge its members “to be efficient users of our resources, and to avoid waste and pollution, and to clean up their own immediate environment, or that over which they have control.” Similarly, it was incumbent upon every person to “get back to the precepts of Sinai and the teachings of Christ our Lord.” Physical salvation for the earth and spiritual salvation for its inhabitants would only be effected with the cumulative moral action of responsible human agents, and no amount of government planning or social activism could make it otherwise.36 Widtsoe and Benson were among the generations of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Mormons in the American (and Canadian) West who in their formative years encountered the land primarily through work, toil, and subsistence. As such, they related to the land rather differently than did the late twentieth-century environmentalists, who were typically prosperous urbanites who appreciated nature for distinctly aesthetic, even spiritual, reasons—who saw “nature” as something separate from human society, to be retreated to for recreation, recu­ peration, and restoration rather than lived in and worked with. These different relationships to the land precipitated often-heated debates, ­especially in the West, where the myth of pristine wilderness coexisted uneasily with the realities of the nation’s most urbanized region.37

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In the second half of the twentieth century, Latter-day Saints in Utah and elsewhere quickly accommodated to new economic and demographic realities, shifting from an agricultural economy to an industrial and then service economy. The social, economic, and demographic arrangement underlying Widtsoe’s declaration that the Saints loved, believed in, and used the land—and found sanctity, holiness, and safety in it—was swallowed up in the Mormon culture region by the siren song of suburbia. Like other suburbanites, late twentieth-century Latter-day Saints endeavored to find ways to remain connected to the land. The LDS Church became the largest sponsor of Boy Scout troops in the United States, with campouts and other nature outings a regular part of the life of any church-attending teenager.38 Increasingly, “nature” became the place where Mormon boys (and to a lesser extent girls—there is a clear gendered dynamic at work) went to have experience, be tested, build character, and engage in self-discovery.39 This fit comfortably within the long tradition of Latter-day Saints viewing the earth as simultaneously sacred and instrumental, as a place of probation and testing where one’s moral character is revealed and refined. Moving to the twenty-first century, we can see that much of the Latter-day Saint environmental tradition was encapsulated in a four-­ paragraph statement, entitled “Environmental Stewardship and Conservation,” posted on the LDS Church’s website in 2013 and since enhanced with striking “nature shot” pictures and videos. Mormon theology’s ­anthropocentric ethic is on full display from the very first sentence: “God created the earth to provide a place for the human family to learn, progress and improve.” Embedded in the statement are the seeds of a structural critique of private property, a culture of mass consumption, and ecologically rapacious practices, but they are only hints that culminate in the blunt statement, “Making the earth ugly offends [God].” A balanced approach including both consumption and conservation is the stated norm, with “the needs of the earth and of current and future ­generations” having a claim over “the immediate vindication of personal desires or avowed rights.” There is no stated position on climate change or any other particular contemporary political debate. The concluding paragraph affirms what Mormon leaders have consistently taught, namely that “the state of the human soul and the environment are interconnected, with each affecting and influencing the other.”40

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And so, in its most definitive statement on one of the defining issues of our time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has remained assiduously apolitical—a stark contrast, of course, to its active involvement in debates and referendums on same-sex marriage. To observe that the latter is the exception and the former the rule for the church’s engagement in the public sphere is to speak correctly while missing the point. The LDS Church is not silent on the matter of environmental care, but it has relegated the matter to the personal conscience and individual stewardship. Over the decades the church’s leaders and laity have taken individual positions on any number of ecological matters, but with the exception of a new commitment to following greener architectural standards, as an institution the modern church has typically taken a laissez-­faire approach to the environment. What appears to be silence is instead an ideology, one that is tacitly skeptical of activist and government regulatory solutions while embracing principles of personal responsibility, individual moral action, and local control. Mainstream Latter-day Saint environmentalism thus fits comfortably within the discourse of modern American conservatism and reinforces an impulse against pronounced activism, regulation, and even preservation. In an area beset with frequent wildfires, the Mormon kindling remains dry.

Notes 1.  “Preserving Traditional Marriage and Strengthening Families,” letter from the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to all church members in California, to be read June 29, 2008, available at https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/california -and-same-sex-marriage. 2.  David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 144–46, 157. On Latter-day Saint opposition to same-sex marriage leading up to and including Proposition 8, see Neil J. Young, “Mormons and Same-Sex Marriage: From ERA to Prop 8,” in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, ed. Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3.  George B. Handley, “Mormon Belief and the Environment,” Patheos, September 15, 2009, http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources

“The fulness of the earth is yours”  95 /Mormon-Belief-and-the-Environment.html. See also George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010). 4.  See 2 Nephi 1:3–9, Book of Mormon. 5.  Brigham Young, “The People of God Disciplined by Trials,” Journal of Discourses 4:51–52. 6.  “Revelation, 7 May 1831 [D&C 49],” p. 81, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-7-may-1831 -dc-49/2; see also Doctrine & Covenants 49:19. 7.  “Revelation, 7 August 1831 [D&C 59],” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-7-august -1831-dc-59/1; see also Doctrine & Covenants 59:16–20. 8.  Other authors have more expressly elucidated a Mormon environmental theology and ethic. For an excellent review of the literature, focusing especially on LDS ecotheology, see George B. Handley, “Toward a Greener Faith: A Review of Recent Mormon Environmental Scholarship,” Mormon Studies Review 3 (2016): 85–103. A few seminal works include Hugh Nibley, “Brigham Young on the Environment,” in To the Glory of God: Mormon Essays on Great Issues, ed. Truman G. Madsen and Charles D. Tate (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1972), 3–29; Richard H. Jackson, “Righteousness and Environmental Change: The Mormons and the Environment,” in Essays on the American West, 1973–1974, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 21– 42; Hugh Nibley, “Subduing the Earth,” in Nibley on the Timely and Timeless: Classic Essays of Hugh W. Nibley (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1978), 85–99; Jeanne Kay and Craig J. Brown, “Mormon Beliefs about Land and Natural Resources, 1847–1877,” Journal of Historical Geography 11, no. 3 (1985): 253–67; Terry Tempest Williams, William B. Smart, and Gibbs M. Smith, eds., New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998); George B. Handley, “The Environmental Ethics of Mormon Belief,” BYU Studies 40, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 187–211; Matthew Gowans and Philip Cafaro, “A Latter-day Saint Environmental Ethic,” Environmental Ethics 25 (2003): 374–94; George B. Handley, Terry B. Ball, and Steven L. Peck, eds., Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2006); Hand­ ley, Home Waters; and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 2 (Summer 2011), a special issue dedicated to Mormonism and the environment. 9.  “Old Testament Revision 1,” p. 18, The Joseph Smith Papers, https:// www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/old-testament-revision-1/20; see also Moses 7:49, Pearl of Great Price. 10.  Mormon 8:31, Book of Mormon. 11.  History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2nd ed. rev. (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1976), 2:71–72.

96  Patrick Q. Mason 12.  Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900, new ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 25–26. 13.  “Revelation, circa 7 March 1831 [D&C 45],” p. 75, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa -7-march-1831-dc-45/5; see also Doctrine & Covenants 45:58. 14.  Abraham 3:24–25, Pearl of Great Price. 15.  The notion of a “Mormon culture region” was first developed in Donald W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (1965): 191–220. 16. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom; Dean L. May, Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 17.  Max J. Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 204. 18.  See John B. Wright, Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 161–66, 245–46; Dan Flores, “Historical Commentary: The Rocky Mountain West, Fragile Space, Diverse Place,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 45 (1995): 56. 19.  Quoted in John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 180. 20.  Kay and Brown, “Mormon Beliefs about Land and Natural Resources,” 260. 21.  Ibid., 261–62; Dan L. Flores, “Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah,” Environmental Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 330–31. 22.  Orson Hyde, “Instructions Concerning Things Temporal and Spiritual,” Journal of Discourses 11:149 (October 7, 1865). 23.  Thomas G. Alexander, “Sylvester Q. Cannon and the Revival of Environmental Consciousness in the Mormon Community,” Environmental History 3, no. 4 (October 1998): 490. On the federal anti-Mormon campaign, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). On the transition of the Mormon economy from a communitarian to free-market model, see Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), chap. 3. Prominent Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley, who often wrote on Mormon environmental theology, critiqued his own grandfather Charles W. Nibley for being responsible for substantial deforestation in Utah, Oregon, and California at the turn of the twentieth century. He wrote, “Grandfather took something priceless and irreplaceable and gave in return a few miles of railroad ties.” Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, ed. Don E. Norton (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1989), 10, 469–70.

“The fulness of the earth is yours”  97 24.  See Alexander, “Sylvester Q. Cannon and the Revival of Environmental Consciousness in the Mormon Community.” 25.  Journal History of the Church, 1830–2008, April 7, 1902, pp. 1–2; available online at https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets?id=d0439c67-8272 -455d-986c-293770e0ef19&crate=0&index=342. On Smoot, see Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 5. 26.  Quoted in Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 220–21. See also Donald H. Dyal, “Mormon Pursuit of the Agrarian Ideal,” Agricultural History 63, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 19–35. 27.  John A. Widtsoe, “An Examination into Conditions on the Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District, Alberta, Canada: A Report Submitted to the Premier of Alberta, February, 1925,” in Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah, 3–4, 17–18. 28.  The principal ideal for nineteenth-century Mormon urban planning was developed by Joseph Smith in what he called the Plat of the City of Zion. It was adapted and roughly applied by Brigham Young in the settlement of the Great Basin. See Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 10, 24; Richard Lyman Bushman, “Making Space for the Mormons,” in Believing History: Latter-day Saint ­Essays, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 173–98. 29.  Benson’s appointment offers an interesting case study in church-state relations in the 1950s, given that he retained his position as an apostle in the LDS Church—the rough equivalent of a Roman Catholic cardinal—even while as ­secretary of agriculture he was ninth in succession to the U.S. presidency. For assessments of Benson’s parallel religious and political careers, see Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); and Matthew L. Harris, Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020). 30.  For his own account of his cabinet years, see Ezra Taft Benson, Cross Fire: The Eight Years with Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962). 31.  For instance, regarding the “problems of peace and the need for adequate defense caused by the threat of godless communism,” Benson wrote to ­Eisenhower, “It occurred to me you may find some assurance and support from the following prophecies regarding America. They are taken from scripture ­sacred to me, the Book of Mormon, and are prophecies of ancient American prophets, the progenitors of the American Indian and are about America.” Letter from Ezra Taft Benson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, November 26, 1957, in LDS Church History Library. 32.  Ezra Taft Benson, address at eighth annual convention of the National Association of Soil Conservation Districts, New Orleans, February 23, 1954; and Benson, address before National Watershed Congress, Washington, DC,

98  Patrick Q. Mason December 6, 1954; both in Frank H. Jonas Collection, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. 33. Benson, Cross Fire, 572. 34.  Brian Allen Drake, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 22. 35.  Ezra Taft Benson, A Plea for America (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1975), 1, 16–17. 36. Benson, A Plea for America, 18, 29, 31. 37.  See Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). As of 2010, 89.8 percent of westerners lived in urban areas, the highest percentage in the nation. U.S. Census, “Growth in Urban Population Outpaces Rest of Nation, Census Bureau Reports,” March 26, 2012, https://www.census .gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb12-50.html. 38.  This was true until 2018, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stopped sponsoring Boy Scout troops. See Samantha Schmidt, “Mormon Church breaks all ties with Boy Scouts, ending 100-year relationship,” Washington Post, May 9, 2018. 39.  On the development of physical education, and especially hiking, as a Mormon religious imperative, see Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, chapter 5. 40. “Environmental Stewardship and Conservation,” https://newsroom .churchofjesuschrist.org/article/environmental-stewardship-conservation; see also another official church resource by the same title at https://www.churchof jesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/environmental-stewardship-and -conservation?lang=eng.

PA RT I I

R ede fining Chu rch, State, and Civil S ociety

CHAPTER 5

“A gauge of our faithfulness” Religion and the Politics of Immigration Reform We n d y L . Wa l l ★

On September 30, 1952, Reverend Edgar Chandler, director of field operations for the World Council of Churches’s Refugee Service, mounted the steps of New York City’s federal courthouse and addressed a seven-­ man panel appointed by President Harry S. Truman to evaluate the nation’s immigration and naturalization policies. Truman had established the commission just weeks earlier, after Congress overrode his veto of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. That legislation, popularly known as the McCarran-Walter Act, left largely intact a restrictive immigration regime based on national origins quotas that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The United States had originally adopted the quota system in the 1920s. Truman and many liberals both in and out of Congress believed it was time for it to go. In his testimony, Chandler recalled the year he had just spent traveling through refugee camps in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Those camps were overflowing with men, women and children who had been displaced by World War II, the first Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Korean War. Others had fled communist regimes in China and Eastern Europe. Chandler reported that the psychology of the refugees and escapees he 101

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encountered was “at an all-time low.” The main reason for their “pessimism and almost hopelessness,” he told his audience, was the immigration policies of the United States, Canada, and Australia—“the whole series of closed doors, beginning with the almost complete closing of our own.” Chandler urged the panel to recommend changes in U.S. immigration policy “that will bring new hope and new life not only to those who actually may come to this country, but to the whole group of uprooted and needy people throughout the world.”1 Chandler was the first of more than six hundred witnesses to appear before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. At least one-quarter of those witnesses spoke on behalf of one or more faith-based organizations. Later that first day, the commission heard ­testimony from representatives of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, the Protestant Episcopal Church, Catholic Charities, the National Lutheran Council, the Synagogue Council of America, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The day’s most colorful witness was Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, general overseer of the Church of God (Pentecostal) and self-proclaimed spokesman for some fifty million members of the Pentecostal and Holiness movements around the globe. Tomlinson was running for president on a “peace” platform. Earlier that month the portly, pink-cheeked bishop had attracted nationwide attention when he set up a forge in front of an Alabama church and beat a sword into a plowshare. Testifying before the commission, Tomlinson urged Congress to slash the defense budget and use the billions thus saved to invite sixty million Europeans to migrate to the United States. “The Bible says that if we do not take care of our kindred we are worse than infidels,” he declared.2 The hearings held by Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization in September and October 1952 marked a turning point in the history of twentieth-century U.S. immigration policy—the moment when foes of the restrictive regime ushered in by the 1924 Im­ migration Act coalesced into something resembling a movement. The parade of representatives from denominations and faith-based organizations who testified before the commission suggests the importance of religious language, issues, and institutions to debates over immigration policy in postwar America. In the two decades between the end of World

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War II and passage of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an array of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant organizations were at the forefront of efforts both to build public support for immigration reform and to shape the contours of that reform. The presence of religious groups in the coalition pushing for policy change is not news to historians, but such groups have rarely merited more than a sentence or two of recognition. This is surprising because few postwar developments changed the face of American religion or politics more than the Immigration Act of 1965. By rejecting the system of national origins quotas put in place in the 1920s and replacing it with a system that favored family reunification and skills, the act opened the door to millions of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. By imposing for the first time a ceiling on immigration from the western hemisphere, the act helped to sustain and generate illegal immigration. In both ways, the act forever changed the nation’s demographic makeup and politics. It opened the door to millions of Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of other non-Judeo-Christian faiths. At the same time, since many of the new arrivals—from Korea, Nigeria, China, Ghana, the Philippines, Brazil and elsewhere—were evangelicals, it ­contributed to what scholars have called the “de-Europeanization of American Christianity” and the “re-evangelization of America.”3 The act transformed vast arenas of American life and fueled political debates over issues ranging from national unity and border control to educational policy and religion in the public sphere. By taking religion seriously—by focusing on the issues that divided religious Americans, as well as on those that united them—we can gain a deeper understanding of the conflicts and compromises that shaped the policies which still dominate our landscape today. In the 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, many Catholic leaders believed a liberal U.S. immigration policy was theologically warranted. They also saw it as a way of relieving overcrowding in Europe and other parts of the world, and thus preventing political instability and the rise of communism. Jewish groups spearheaded the effort to dismantle the system of national origins quotas, but they generally worried less about the total number of immigrants allowed into the United States than about the discriminatory symbolism of such quotas. Mainline Protestants—led by missionaries and those who

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had worked with displaced persons and refugees—also favored substantial reform; still, some worried that simply opening the nation’s doors to the world’s “surplus” populations would keep the Catholic Church from revisiting its position on birth control and might increase Catholicism’s religious and political power within the United States. Fears of Catholic power—together with worries that an influx of non-Protestant immigrants would undermine America’s tradition of “religious freedom”—­ fueled the opposition of evangelicals to any substantial change in U.S. immigration law. Policymakers, activists, and journalists who supported reform frequently blurred such distinctions. Rather than highlighting disagreements within or between religious communities, they often invoked a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus as evidence that the vast majority of Americans supported sweeping immigration reform. Thus, attention to religious voices and language can also shed light on the politics of the so-called liberal consensus—a concept that has been widely critiqued and yet is still often credited with producing the sweeping policy changes of the 1960s. In recent years scholars have highlighted the emergence in the late 1940s and 1950s of a “tri-faith” vision of America, a vision promoted not only by Catholics and Jews, but also by an array of government, business, and media elites.4 To date, historians have paid relatively little attention to the impact of this tri-faith vision on policy debates beyond a few specific arenas such as school prayer and civil rights. The debate over immigration policy—particularly as it heated up in the 1950s—shows how some liberals deployed the language of tri-faith agreement for political ends. They attempted to forge a national consensus on the need for legislative reform by suggesting that a religious consensus already existed. A close look at the immigration debate also suggests that scholars may have underestimated both the issues and the prejudices that con­ tinued to divide religious groups even during the heyday of the “Judeo-­ Christian consensus.” Most Catholic, Jewish, and mainline Protestant leaders favored a dramatic revision of the nation’s immigration laws, but, as previously noted, their emphases and policy prescriptions weren’t always aligned. Moreover, their efforts to mobilize the faithful—through publications, religious schools, the pulpit, and church-sanctioned

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­ atherings—sometimes backfired. Many clergy and congregants wrote g their politicians urging reform, but others lambasted the “liberal” positions taken by their denominational leaders. This suggests that immigration policy was the kind of wedge issue identified by David Hollinger as driving mainline Protestants into the evangelical camp.5 In exploring the intersection of religion and immigration reform, this essay argues for a fuller understanding of the place of religion in postwar policy debates. Scholars have devoted extensive attention to the connection between religion and a handful of policy issues, most notably anti-communism, civil rights, and abortion, and such obvious churchstate issues as school funding and school prayer. The connection between religion and many other postwar policy concerns—poverty, health care, the environment, and disarmament, to name a few—are just beginning to attract attention. Exploring the role of religious organizations, issues, and language in these less-obvious arenas will enrich our understanding of both politics and religion in the twentieth century. On June 25, 1952, President Truman vetoed the McCarran-Walter bill. That bill, which had been passed by Congress some two weeks earlier, represented the first major attempt to overhaul U.S. immigration policy since the 1920s. Supporters of the legislation argued that it codified existing policy while eliminating instances of racial and gender discrimination and tightening national security provisions. Opponents, however, were outraged that the bill simply reaffirmed the system of national origins quotas that Congress had put in place in 1924.6 In his veto message, Truman acknowledged that the bill contained some progressive provisions. Nevertheless, he argued, by retaining the national origins quota system, the bill “discriminates, deliberately and intentionally, against many of the peoples of the world.” Retention of this system did more than irritate American allies and insult American citizens. “It repudiates our basic religious concepts, our belief in the brotherhood of man,” Truman declared, adding, “I am sure that with a little more time and a little more discussion in this country, the public conscience and the good sense of the American people will assert themselves.”7 Congress easily overrode the president’s veto, so a few months later Truman took steps to spur the “public conscience.” In the final months of his administration, he established the immigration commission and

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charged it with recommending ways to bring the nation’s laws “into line with our national ideals and our foreign policy.”8 Truman chose the commission’s seven members with particular attention to two issues: all of those appointed supported an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, and while all were white and male, they collectively represented a range of faith traditions. The commission’s chairman, Philip B. Perlman, was the first Jew to serve as solicitor general. Other members included Monsignor John O’Grady, secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Charities; Clarence E. Pickett, honorary secretary of the American Friends Service Committee; and Reverend Thaddeus F. Gullixson, president of Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul. This attention to religious diversity in part reflected the important role that faith-based organizations had played in postwar efforts to resettle displaced persons and refugees. It likely also reflected a White House desire to project a national moral consensus on the immigration issue. Certainly, the commission implied the existence of such a consensus when it issued its final report, Whom We Shall Welcome, synthesizing the results of thirty days of hearings held in eleven cities around the country. The report declared the nation’s immigration law to be “a gauge of our faithfulness to the high moral and spiritual principles of our founding fathers—to whom all people, as the children of God, were the most important resources of a free nation.” It condemned the national origins quota system as discriminatory and archaic, and recommended replacing that system with one that allocated visas on the basis of preferences including the right of asylum, the reunion of families, U.S. labor needs, and the “special needs of the free world.” The report also called for raising the annual ceiling on quota immigration by about 60 percent.9 Although these proposals were not immediately adopted—significant policy change took another twelve years—the report immediately became “the benchmark for reform efforts.”10 The commission’s report was based on testimony from 634 witnesses, including labor and business leaders, social scientists, and the heads of civic, patriotic and veterans’ organizations. Still, the commission repeatedly emphasized and highlighted consensus among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups. The report’s third paragraph noted that “all the major religious faiths of America” had urged the president to ap-

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point the commission. Another section cited “indisputable evidence” that Americans were “moving toward agreement” on the need for immigration reform; that evidence was the fact that “leading Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations criticized [the McCarran-Walter Act] for similar reasons; and that, in some places, a single representative was authorized to speak for many lay and religious organizations of different denominations.” The commission also invoked tri-faith agreement to reinforce its arguments that “American immigration law is as much a part of our foreign policy as a foreign treaty,” and that the United States “could safely absorb some 250,000 immigrants a year.”11 News coverage by sympathetic journalists both during and after the commission’s hearings also tended to stress agreement among religious groups. The New York Times headlined an article on the hearings in St. Paul, Minnesota, “3 Faiths Ask Easing of the M’Carran Law.” A week later the paper reported on seven Georgia clergymen who had told the commission that the McCarran-Walter Act was “America’s ‘Iron Curtain.’” These clergymen, the paper added, “represented the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths.” An article in the New Republic noted that “spokesmen for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups” had addressed the commission and stressed that “the substance of testimony seldom varied.”12 This emphasis on a broad tri-faith consensus was a moral counterweight, likely intended to divert public attention from the fact that both houses of Congress had just passed the McCarran-Walter Act by overwhelming majorities.13 In fact, such invocations of interfaith agreement elided disagreements both within and between faith communities over the specifics of immigration reform. This essay highlights two such disagreements: a controversy within the Catholic Church over tactics, and a strategic and substantive difference between Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals that likely had a more far-reaching effect on immigration reform. During the debate that preceded passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC)—the fore­ runner to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops—came out in support of the legislation, a move that aided passage of the bill by undermining the opposition of other religious groups. The organization’s

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­ fficial support of the bill resulted from a strategic decision made by o NCWC staffers who concluded that alternative legislation had no chance of passage and that the McCarran-Walter bill was preferable to the ­status quo.14 Although many bishops supported the move, it sparked a firestorm of protest within the Church. Some bishops, clerics, and lay leaders argued that the bill turned Americans of Southern and Eastern European descent into second-class citizens, aided communists by hurting the U.S. image abroad, and violated Christian ideals of immigration promoted by the pope. Members of the Catholic Press Association called McCarran-­ Walter “nationally and racially discriminatory,” and editors of more than one hundred Catholic newspapers urged Truman to veto it.15 Boston Archbishop Richard Cushing condemned the act as “un-Christian and un-American,” while Archbishop Joseph Ritter of St. Louis organized a fall conference and invited leading Catholics to speak out against the legislation.16 No Catholic leader did more to fan the flames of protest within the church than Monsignor John O’Grady. O’Grady had become passionate about the immigration issue the previous winter, when he spent time in southern Italy and observed the degree to which resentment of U.S. ­immigration policy was fueling support for communism.17 In addition to  decrying the policy in closed-door meetings with NCWC staffers and the heads of other Catholic agencies, O’Grady took his complaints public. He wrote letters to Senate opponents of the McCarran-Walter bill, applauding them for their “valiant fight.”18 He held press conferences in New York, Washington, DC, and other cities to condemn both the NCWC and the bill, and he attacked both again in an opinion piece ­published in Commonweal.19 Finally, O’Grady wrote President Truman, urging him to veto the legislation.20 In fact, O’Grady’s fierce and public opposition to the McCarran-Walter bill was likely the reason that Truman tapped him to serve on the presidential commission. O’Grady’s appointment clearly alarmed some members of the Church hierarchy. The day after the appointment was announced, Monsignor Howard J. Carroll, general secretary of the NCWC, wrote to five of the bishops who sat on the conference’s administrative board. Carroll noted that “a Jewish gentleman of the White House staff” was setting up the presidential commission, adding that O’Grady’s appointment was

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hardly surprising since he, like “Jewish groups,” “adhered to the ad­ ministration ‘line’ with regard to the McCarran Bill.” Carroll predicted that O’Grady’s appointment would be “a source of further irritation, ­embarrassment and confusion.”21 Indeed, during the hearings, O’Grady and his allies worked overtime to line up Catholic witnesses and to ­provide them with the ammunition they needed to condemn the McCarran-­­­Walter bill.22 In a memo accompanying his letter to the bishops, Carroll also complained that O’Grady favored too close an alliance with Jews and Protestants. “The N.C.W.C. staff is convinced that neither the Jewish nor the Protestant groups are particularly interested in furthering Catholic immigration into the United States,” he wrote. This pointed to a significant divide between faiths, one over both substance and emphasis. During the immediate postwar period, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant groups were all deeply concerned about and involved with the resettlement of refugees and displaced persons. But this issue frequently bled into a second one: that of “surplus” populations. Although overpopu­ lation was and is a difficult term to define, most experts agreed that the problem existed when the natural or economic resources in a given area were not sufficient to support the local population.23 In European countries ranging from Italy to Holland, economic devastation, the loss of colonies abroad, and a steady stream of “escapees” from communist nations exacerbated the lingering problems of population displacement caused by World War II. There and particularly in less developed parts of the world, medical advances were lowering death rates, leading to what was already beginning to be called a “population explosion.” Whatever they thought of the McCarran-Walter legislation, most members of the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic press agreed with O’Grady that the Church had “an interest in relieving European countries of their surplus populations so that they may be able to establish stable economies, develop constructive social programs, and resist the inroads of Communism.”24 (In fact, the internal Catholic debate over McCarran-Walter reflected disagreement over the best means of achieving this end.) While this argument was political and pragmatic, it also aligned with Catholic theology, which asserted a “natural right” of man to migrate. In 1952 Pope Pius XII issued an apostolic constitution, Exsul

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Familia, in which he argued that God had created “all good things primarily for the good of all.” Given this, when men in overpopulated areas could not support their families, they had a God-given right to migrate to areas of the globe where resources were more plentiful. The pope ­recognized a degree of state sovereignty, but he argued that it could not be “exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent peoples of other nations.” The pope specifically condemned “the overly restrictive provisions” of U.S. immigration law.25 Pope Pius XII and other members of the Catholic hierarchy reiterated and developed this message in letters, radio addresses, articles, and speeches to lay leaders, diplomats, legislators, and other audiences both in the U.S. and abroad. In 1954 Monsignor Edward E. Swanstrom, executive director of Catholic Relief Services, urged Christians to reject “the Neo-Malthusian attitude that gave rise to the term ‘surplus popu­ lations,’” adding that Christians “cannot conceive of an image of the ­Creator being ‘surplus’ in the economy of earth or the economy of salvation.” Swanstrom argued that it was not possible to transport enough foreign aid from “have” to “have-not” countries, so “the charitable and practical course is to allow migration from the over-populated areas” to resource-rich countries like the United States.26 In an encyclical issued nine years later, Pope John XXIII advocated “bringing the work to the workers, whenever possible.” But he added that those living in areas with insufficient economic resources “must be permitted to emigrate to other countries.” “The fact that [a human being] is a citizen of a particular State,” the pope reasoned, “does not deprive him of membership in the human family, nor of citizenship in that universal society, the common, world-wide fellowship of men.”27 This emphasis on relieving population pressures abroad set Catholic immigration reformers apart from many of the Jewish organizations and individuals at the forefront of the immigration reform campaign. Millions of European Jews had perished during the Holocaust, and others were caught behind the Iron Curtain. Zionists, the group most concerned with spurring Jewish immigration in the postwar decades, focused their attention on Israel. The Jewish groups who worked to reform U.S. immigration policy in the postwar decades were less concerned with

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moving global populations from areas of poverty to areas of plenty than with combating anti-Semitism at home. As Mae Ngai has rightly noted, they were primarily concerned with eradicating the stigma that national origins quotas conveyed—in other words, with symbolic reform.28 This “abstract and formal approach” prompted Jewish individuals such as New York senator Herbert Lehman and historian Oscar Handlin, a key Lehman adviser, to advocate as early as 1953 for imposing a cap on ­immigration from the western hemisphere. Since eastern hemisphere immigration was limited, they argued, such a step was necessary for the sake of “consistency.”29 Jewish and Catholic leaders in the United States thus viewed the issue of immigration reform through very different lenses. Mainline Protestants represented a third perspective. Officials of the National Council of Churches (NCC), together with its affiliated organizations and constituent denominations, argued against the national origins quota system on humanitarian, symbolic, and foreign-policy grounds; however, they saved most of their passion for the plight of refugees, escapees, and displaced persons. While they too acknowledged that the overpopulation problem was dire, representatives of mainline Protestant churches frequently warned that immigration was not the solution. In fact, in 1960 one American official of the World Council of Churches called any attempt to promote an international right to migration “foolhardy.” ­“Demographic considerations,” he warned, “provide a powerful argument for restrictive and conservative immigration policies.”30 Unlike their Catholic counterparts, most mainline Protestant leaders stressed that the solution to the problem of global overpopulation lay not in immigration, but in family planning. Reverend Roswell P. Barnes, the pioneering ecumenicist who headed the World Council of Churches’ U.S. conference, alluded to this point when addressing a major conclave on U.S. immigration policy hosted by the NCC in 1961. The question of “moral responsibility” for sharing material goods and natural resources, he suggested, was closely related to “the question of moral responsibility for discipline and restraint in bringing into the world children who have little prospect for a decent physical existence.”31 Other conference participants made the same point. The authors of a background paper on “Population Pressures” warned that overpopulation threatened to give

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rise “to some of the most serious and dangerous problems the human race has ever faced.” War was not a solution to the problem: “Even a global holocaust of missiles and nuclear bombs bringing death to half the people of Europe and North America” would barely dent the rising tide. Nor could migration provide the answer. “It is becoming quite clear that the ultimate solution is to be found in population limitation—preferably by voluntary family planning,” the paper’s authors concluded.32 While most mainline Protestants talked generically about the need for family planning, some pointed out that the “overpopulated” countries of Europe were primarily Catholic and that, in less developed areas, Catholic doctrine was stimulating population growth. The religious overtones of the immigration argument surfaced explicitly in August 1952, when the Catholic Association for International Peace urged the U.S. to accept more immigrants from Asia and argued that “economically favored countries have a moral obligation to assist in the resettlement of displaced persons, expellees and surplus populations of the world.”33 The Christian Century applauded the association’s “anti-racism” but noted that many Protestants might oppose the idea that “this country [is] under obligation to absorb ‘surplus’ populations from lands where Catholic doctrine encourages overpopulation.”34 A few mainline Protestants went even further, not only decrying the pronatalist policies of the Catholic Church, but accusing the Church of using immigration to increase its influence in the United States. In early June 1952, the Christian Century published an article by Reverend Ralph E. Smeltzer, a Church of the Brethren minister, attacking both the McCarran-Walter bill then pending before Congress and an emergency measure (supported by the NCWC) designed to bring three hundred thousand nonquota European immigrants to the United States. Smeltzer had volunteered in the Manzanar internment camp during World War II, and after the war helped relocate more than a thousand Japanese American families. He spent 1964 to 1965 in Selma, Alabama, trying to mediate between the city’s Black leadership and white establishment in the year before the city became the focus of the national civil rights movement.35 In 1952 Smeltzer condemned the McCarran-Walter Act as racially discriminatory. At the same time, he called on Protestants to ­“immediately and strongly oppose” the emergency bill, arguing that it “would commit the United States to accept responsibility for absorb-

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ing ‘surplus populations.’” “Roman Catholics see in [this bill] an opportunity to increase their religious and political power in the United States,” Smeltzer wrote. “It would also help the Vatican to meet the serious problem it faces in Italy without fundamental reform.” Smeltzer warned that Roman Catholic leaders were “deliberately and cleverly” using “the sympathies of people for the uprooted ‘refugees’ in Europe” to “quietly secur[e] ‘surplus population’ legislation.” If the bill were passed, he ­cautioned, “the surplus population advocates will have got their foot in the door.”36 In the 1950s and early 1960s, few representatives of mainline Protestantism expressed anti-Catholic views as openly as Smeltzer. Evan­ gelicals, however, were less restrained. The pages of United Evangelical Action, the official publication of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), were filled with attacks on the NCC, the American Jewish Congress, and other religious organizations that had joined what the magazine’s editors called a “conspiracy by the left-wing liberals” seeking to dismantle the national origins quota system.37 The editors and some readers, however, saved special vitriol for the Catholic Church, which they saw as persecuting evangelicals abroad and working to undermine “religious freedom” at home. In 1952 the magazine quoted an unnamed “Italian NAE leader” as warning that a flood of Italian Catholics might put the U.S. “under the dictatorship of a theocracy headed by some Roman Catholic Bishop” sent “from Italy as a Papal Delegate.”38 In a 1956 letter to the editor, Carl J. Nelson of Turlock, California, charged that “the Roman Church is bending every effort to gain entrance for Catholic immigrants from all parts of the world” in order “to increase her numbers, prestige and influence in the USA.”39 The following year the magazine decried a torrent of “nominal Christians”—“Roman or Greek Catholic[s] with so-called ‘continental’ ideas of Christian conduct and citizenship”—who it believed were “dictating the political, ­edu­cational, social, legislative and cultural decisions America is making today.”40 Such sentiments made the NAE the only major religious group in the 1950s and early 1960s to oppose any substantial changes in the nation’s immigration law. At its annual convention in 1957, the NAE reaffirmed its support for national origins quotas, arguing that any departure from that system would allow in large numbers of people who did not

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understand the “American heritage” of religious freedom.41 In 1965 the NAE again passed a resolution supporting the quota system. “The United States concept of religious freedom includes separation of church and state which cannot be readily understood or appreciated by people who for a lifetime have been taught that the union of church and state in some degree is a divine imperative,” the NAE declared. It added that any change in immigration law that opened the door to more immigrants would undermine the Bill of Rights.42 Faith-based groups did not limit their political activity to offering testimony or passing resolutions. Between 1957 and 1965, the NAE repeatedly urged its members to write their senators and congressmen ­opposing any changes to the McCarran-Walter Act. At the same time, Catholic, Jewish, and many mainline Protestant denominations played a key role both in building public support for immigration reform and in pressuring politicians to act. The NCWC spawned and helped staff the American Committee on Italian Migration, an ethnic organization that quickly moved to the forefront of the reform campaign. Italian American Catholics and other Catholic reformers met in church basements and parish halls, advertised through church newsletters and lay Catholic organizations, and recruited priests and the faithful to address and attend events such as a 1963 immigration reform rally in Chicago’s McCormick Place.43 The American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and other Jewish groups orchestrated public events and letter-writing campaigns on behalf of ­immigration reform, while arranging for the publication and distribution of relevant books by such allies as Senators Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.44 Meanwhile, Protestant churches ranging from the Episcopalians to the northern American Baptists denounced U.S. immigration law in church newsletters and special mailings. They urged pastors and parishioners to “devote prayerful study to the issue” and to inform their political leaders of their views.45 Such campaigns clearly mobilized the faithful. Between 1957 and 1965, Senator Sam Ervin, a powerful North Carolina Democrat and a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, received scores of letters and petitions from religious entities and individuals urging him to back immigration reform. His immigration files include letters from a

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Presbyterian rector in Oregon; a Methodist women’s group in Burnsville, North Carolina; the pastor of a Lutheran church in Iowa; and the North Carolina chapter of B’nai B’rith. Some correspondents asked Ervin to support a complete overhaul of McCarran-Walter, while others favored the admission of more refugees or the reassignment of unused quotas to countries with long waiting lists. In 1963 Ervin received a petition with five pages of signatures collected by the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Charlotte asking him to increase the Greek quota. Form letters also poured in from Greeks across the state, warning the senator that “the eyes of Eastern Orthodoxy are focused upon your action.” Two years later the minister of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina, urged Ervin to support the bill then pending in Congress. “Not only do the racial insults implied in the present [national ­origins quota] system harm our foreign relations and national image abroad,” Reverend Robert S. Busey wrote, “but we also seem to be depriving ourselves of some very valuable potential citizens by use of ­irrational criteria.”46 Not all of Ervin’s correspondents appreciated the political activism of their faith communities. In 1957 the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Statesville, North Carolina, copied Ervin on an angry letter he had just dashed off to Episcopal Churchnews. That publication had reprinted statements by Episcopal, Church World Service, and NCC officials condemning the national origins quota system and urging Congress to open the doors to more refugees. “Our church leadership can get itself out on some gosh-awful limbs,” Reverend James Dees wrote Ervin. ­“Believe me, they don’t represent the thinking of the people, at least not in the South.”47 In June 1965, A.W. McAlister Jr. of Greensboro, North Carolina, complained of the “organized effort” by various Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic groups to “destroy the influence of the White Anglo-­Saxon Protestants in both politics and religion” by advancing immigration reform. As evidence he attached an issue of a monthly publication put out by “my own church,” the United Church of Christ, which “is from cover to cover dedicated to this subject.”48 These individuals were hardly alone, and at least some who felt alienated by such liberal political activism likely drifted into the conservative evangelical fold. Certainly, the NAE was attuned to such possibilities. In a 1957 article in United Evangelical Action, an NAE official

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told of an “active Presbyterian churchwoman” in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who had been appalled to discover that “materials distributed by her denomination to the women’s group across the nation were slanted to develop opposition” to the McCarran-Walter Act. “That church organizations should lead the drive to open up the immigration act is dis­ concerting to many church members,” he opined. The NAE ordered thirty-six thousand reprints of the article and sent it to churches and individuals across the nation.49 So what does all this mean for our understanding of religion and politics in the twentieth century? At the very least, it suggests that religious entities, issues, and language played a larger role in the politics of midcentury immigration reform than scholars have generally realized. It also reveals oft-overlooked fissures in the coalition that backed such reform. One prominent immigration historian, for instance, has argued that “McCarthyism’s assault on the left silenced anticolonial and internationalist politics,” leading immigration reformers to an unchallenged embrace of “liberal nationalism.” Such nationalism privileged U.S. economic interests over the needs of sending nations.50 The Red Scare undoubtedly shaped debates over immigration reform, but this argument overlooks the views of many Catholic and some other religious leaders who believed that U.S. immigration policy should be marshaled to address the problem of global overpopulation. They embraced an “internationalist” agenda—one that could be both compatible with anti-­ communism and at odds with U.S. economic nationalism. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, evangelicals were just beginning to flex their political muscles. Religious conservatives have been almost entirely ignored by historians of immigration policy, but they too may have helped stall and then shape immigration reform.51 The NAE encouraged its members to oppose any changes to the McCarran-Walter Act, and evangelical churches provided conduits for the dissemination of conservative newsletters and views. Ardent opponents of immigration reform also deluged Ervin with mail, and some of these individuals deployed virulently anti-Catholic language that they likely honed in evangelical networks. Reverend Melvin Sparks of Pinecroft Church of Christ in Hamlet, North Carolina, for instance, warned in 1964 that any substantial change in immigration law would lead “Communists and Roman

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Catholics [to] flood our Country.”52 The following year James P. Cating of Raleigh decried the expected passage of “that blatantly Catholic immigration act.” “Everyone else loses when new hordes of Catholic ­Rabbits come in to further overpopulate us and increasingly gain power,” he declared.53 Such arguments may have contributed to one of the most ­conservative—and consequential—provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act: its limitation on immigration from the western hemisphere. Senator Lehman first proposed such a cap in 1953, but reform-minded policymakers soon took it off the table, and it was strongly opposed by both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In the final round of negotiations, two powerful senators—Ervin and minority leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.)—forced the White House to accept the provision as the price of passing the immigration bill out of their Senate subcommittee.54 Historians have generally suggested that Southern Democrats and their conservative allies held the bill hostage because of their shared ­concerns about the racial character of potential immigrants from Latin America and the West Indies—the western hemisphere’s “browns and blacks.”55 Racial anxieties undoubtedly shaped Ervin’s stance. A self-­ described country lawyer fond of quoting Shakespeare and Aesop’s fables in his Southern drawl, Ervin led the fight against civil rights legislation and openly questioned the contribution of Indonesians and Congolese to American culture. But Ervin also quoted Bible verses, and his response to Cating suggests that religion too may have been on his mind. “You are correct that the original measure would have resulted in increased immigration from the Catholic countries,” he wrote, but the bill just passed did “exactly the opposite.” His amendment, he explained, restricted immigration from fast-growing and “predominantly Catholic” Latin America for the first time in U.S. history. For that reason, “in the future we will be receiving fewer immigrants from Catholic countries than we have in the past.”56 Dirksen’s motives are harder to untangle, and his paper trail thinner, because he transacted so much of his business over the phone. Still, if race may not have been Ervin’s only consideration, it seems even less likely to have been the primary factor motivating Dirksen. Though a steadfast conservative with libertarian tendencies, the Illinois senator had

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just delivered the Republican votes needed to pass both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dirksen was, however, a lifelong member of the evangelical Christian Reformed Church and had honed his speaking skills filling in at the pulpit. When the Senate took up the immigration bill, he was in the midst of promoting a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in public schools. Dirksen’s principal allies in that fight were evangelicals and fundamentalists, who viewed the ban on school prayer as they did immigration. They saw both as threats to America’s “religious freedom.” Whatever influence on immigration policy evangelicals had in 1965, their position looks, in hindsight, deeply ironic. If evangelical churches once benefited from the defection of conservative white mainline Protestants, their numbers have been buoyed in recent years by immigrants from Africa, Asia, and especially Latin America. Today, at least one-­ quarter of American evangelicals are nonwhite or Hispanic, compared to just 14 percent of those who attend mainline Protestant churches.57 Moreover, with the proportion of white evangelicals in the population declining steeply, such immigrants are a key source of evangelical growth. This shift has begun to reshape evangelical politics. While many in the white rank and file continue to favor immigration restrictions, a growing number of evangelical leaders—and certainly their nonwhite ­congregants—strongly support refugee resettlement and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.58 In 2014 the NAE finally expunged its 1957 and 1965 immigration resolutions from its website. It replaced those resolutions with a lengthy discussion of the need for reform.

Notes 1.  Hearings before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 4–6. 2.  Hearings, 41–43; “Bishop Begins Campaign for Presidency,” Kingsport Times-News (September 14, 1952): 3; “Beats Sword into Plowshare,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune (September 15, 1952): 8. Tomlinson’s enthusiasm for immigrants did not extend to all. Two months after testifying at the commission, he argued that

“A gauge of our faithfulness”  119 seven hundred thousand Puerto Ricans, roughly one-third of the island’s population, should be encouraged to migrate to Latin America rather than the mainland “because the culture of the Latin countries would be more congenial to the Spanish-speaking islanders.” “Mass Emigration Urged,” New York Times, November 25, 1952, 6. 3.  R. Stephen Warner, “Immigrants and the Faith They Bring,” Christian Century (February 10, 2004): 20; and Mark A. Noll, “Where We Are and How We Got Here,” Christianity Today (September 29, 2006), 42. 4.  For example, see Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5.  David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History ( June 2011): 21–48. 6.  The national origins quota system imposed in the 1920s limited immigration to the U.S. from non-Asian nations in the eastern hemisphere to 2 percent of the foreign-born from that nation counted in the 1890 census. The McCarran-Walter Act retained the notion of national origins quotas, although it redistributed quotas according to the “national origins” of the white population in the 1920 census. The bill also gave the husbands of U.S. citizens the same nonquota status long assigned to wives, ended Asian exclusion, and removed ­racial barriers to naturalization. At the same time, it allowed only token Asian immigration and curbed immigration from the West Indies. 7.  Harry S. Truman, “Veto of Bill to Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality” ( June 25, 1952), available through the American Presidency Project at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents /veto-bill-revise-the-laws-relating-immigration-naturalization-and-nationality. 8. Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, Whom We Shall ­Welcome (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953), 273. 9. Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, Whom We Shall ­Welcome, 263–66. Many immigrants—including alien wives of American citizens, migrants from the western hemisphere, and some refugees and displaced ­persons—fell outside of the quota system. 10.  Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 318. 11. Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, Whom We Shall ­Welcome, xi, 9, 49–50, and 80.

120  Wendy L. Wall 12.  “3 Faiths Ask Easing of the M’Carran Law,” New York Times, October 11, 1952, 15; “M’Carran Act Assailed: 7 Georgia Clergymen Attack It as America’s ‘Iron Curtain,’” New York Times, October 18, 1952, 19; Tom Fitzsimmons, “The Nation Talks Back to McCarran,” New Republic, January 12, 1953, 10. 13.  The House overrode Truman’s veto by a vote of 278 to 113. The vote in the Senate was 57 to 26. 14.  See the contents of folder 18, box 40, National Catholic Welfare Conference Executive Department/Office of the General Secretary, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (hereafter NCWC Papers); and Todd Scribner, “Negotiating Priorities: The National Catholic Welfare Conference and United States Migration Policy in a Post-World War II World, 1948–1952,” American Catholic Studies 121 (December 2010): 61–86. 15. Editorial, The Sign (August 1952), 5; “Veto of the McCarran Bill,” America ( July 5, 1952), 347. 16.  “Cushing Condemns Immigration Law,” New York Times, October 3, 1952; and “Archbishop Ritter Wants More Fair Immigration Law,” Catholic Telegraph-­Register, October 31, 1952. 17.  John O’Grady to Walter E. Alessandroni, October 23, 1952, in “Immigration: McCarran Act (1952)” folder, box 8, Msgr. John O’Grady Papers, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter O’Grady Papers). 18.  John O’Grady to Sen. John O. Pastore, May 23, 1952; and letters from O’Grady to Senators Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman, Joseph C. O’Mahoney, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, William Benton, and Brian McMahon, all dated May 26, 1952; “Immigration: General (1952)” folder, box 7, O’Grady ­Papers. 19.  “Comments on Statements and Activities of Monsignor O’Grady on the Immigration Question,” September 9, 1952, folder 17, box 40, NCWC Papers; “Immigration Bill Hit by Catholic Leader,” New York Times, June 25, 1952, 16; John O’Grady, “The McCarran Immigration Bill,” Commonweal ( June 20, 1952): 263. 20.  O’Grady to Harry S. Truman, May 26, 1952, “Immigration: General (1952)” folder, box 7, O’Grady Papers. 21.  Msgr. Howard J. Carroll to Archbishop Francis P. Keough, with copies to Archbishop Karl Alter, Cardinal Edward Mooney, Cardinal Samuel Stritch, and Bishop Emmett Walsh, September 5, 1952, folder 20, box 40, NCWC ­Papers. 22. For examples of long briefing memos and other materials sent by O’Grady to potential witnesses, see “Immigration: General (1952)” folder, box 7, O’Grady Papers. For another example, see the letter and assorted materials sent by Msgr. Edward Swanstrom to Diocesan Resettlement Directors in folder 20, box 40, NCWC Papers.

“A gauge of our faithfulness”  121 23.  Council of Europe, Committee of Experts on the Problem of Refugees and Overpopulation, Refugees and Surplus Elements of Population (Strasbourg: Secretariat-­General of the Council of Europe, 1953), 9–10; Joyce Oramel Hertz­ ler, The Crisis in World Population: A Sociological Examination, with Special Reference to the Underdeveloped Areas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1956), 94. 24.  “Will the People of the United States Now Close Their Doors to Displaced Persons?”, memo prepared by O’Grady for discussion at the NCWC’s Meeting on Immigration on March 3, 1952, in “Immigration: McCarran Act (1952)” folder, box 8, O’Grady Papers. In February 1952, the NCWC’s Bureau of Migration and allied Catholic institutions agreed to undertake “an educational crusade to inculcate [in Catholics] a Christian and democratic attitude toward immigration.” The fact that they felt the need to undertake such a crusade suggests that not all Catholics shared the beliefs of many Church leaders. “Excerpts from Meeting on Immigration Problems,” February 27, 1952, folder 18, box 40, NCWC Papers. 25.  Pope Pius XII, Exsul Familia Nazarethana, August 1, 1952, at http://www .papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/p12exsul.htm. 26.  Edward E. Swanstrom, “The Christian Attitude towards Migration,” Social Compass ( January 1956): 10–14. Swanstrom originally gave this address to the meeting of the International Catholic Migration Commission in Breda, the Netherlands, September 1954. 27.  Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963, at http://www.vatican .va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963 _pacem.html. 28.  Mae M. Ngai, “‘The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudices’: The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration Reform, 1945–1965,” in Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 115. In this chapter, Ngai rightly attributes this viewpoint above all to American Jews. In ­Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), however, Ngai tends to equate the views of Jewish individuals such as Lehman and Handlin with the views of all backers of immigration reform. 29.  Lehman first proposed a “blanket cap” on immigration to the U.S. in his testimony before Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. He later incorporated this cap into an omnibus immigration bill he introduced in 1953. Hearings, 61; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 255. To be sure, some Jewish individuals felt differently. The powerful New York congressman Emanuel Celler, for instance, sponsored emergency legislation in 1952 designed to relieve population pressures abroad. 30.  Richard M. Fagley, The Population Explosion and Christian Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 53, 57. Fagley was executive s­ ecretary

122  Wendy L. Wall of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, World Council of Churches. 31.  Roswell P. Barnes, “Highlights and Dilemmas of Protestant Experience in U.S. Immigration,” “Immigration and Refugees, 1961–69” folder, box 20, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America–­ Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, 1945–1973, Presbyterian Historical Society (hereafter NCCC Records). 32.  “Population Pressures,” a background paper for Workshop III of the Consultation on Immigration Policy in the United States, “Immigration & Refugees, 1961–69” folder, box 20, NCCC Records. For further discussion of this issue, see Benson Y. Landis and Constant H. Jacquet Jr., Immigration Programs and Policies of Churches of the United States (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ, 1957), 32, 34–36, 56. Landis and Jacquet noted an irony: “Many Protestants are critical of lack of control of population in nations with surplus populations abroad. But most Protestant bodies in the United States have not officially recommended birth control to the American people.” 33.  “Catholic Unit Scores U.S. on Asian Curbs,” New York Times (August 3, 1952), 4, emphasis added. 34.  “Pope and Catholics Show Concern for Migrants,” Christian Century (August 27, 1952): 965. 35.  Steve L. Longenecker, Selma’s Peacemaker: Ralph Smeltzer and Civil Rights Mediation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 36.  Ralph E. Smeltzer, “For Justice in Immigration,” Christian Century 69 ( June 4, 1952): 666–68. 37.  “Immigration Hearings,” United Evangelical Action ( January 1, 1956): 6. 38.  “Italian Immigration,” United Evangelical Action (November 15, 1952): 11. 39.  “Immigration Again,” United Evangelical Action (March 15, 1956): 42. 40.  “The Tragedy of America’s Newborn Religiosity,” United Evangelical ­Action (March 15, 1957): 19. 41. “Resolutions,” United Evangelical Action (May 15, 1957): 9. 42.  National Association of Evangelicals, “Immigration Laws 1965,” www .nae.net/fullresolutionlist/194-immigration-laws-1965 (last accessed on August 13, 2013). The NAE has since removed this resolution from its website. 43.  Danielle Battisti, Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 206, 212; Anthony Sorrentino, Organizing the Ethnic Community: An Account of the Origin, History, and Development of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, 1952– 1995 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1995), 34–35. 44.  Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to  the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ­207–209.

“A gauge of our faithfulness”  123 45.  This quote comes from a packet of materials mailed to six thousand American Baptist pastors in April 1965, as Congress was considering the HartCeller Act. It can be found in subgroup A, box 115, folder 5083, of the Sam Ervin Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter Ervin Papers). 46.  See petition in folder 3908, box 87; and Busey to Ervin (February 3, 1965) in folder 5081, box 115: both in Ervin Papers. 47.  Rev. James P. Dees to Ervin (April 3, 1957), folder 1382, box 22, Ervin Papers. 48.  A.W. McAlister Jr. to Ervin ( June 5, 1965), folder 5084, box 115, Ervin Papers. 49.  Clyde W. Taylor, “Where Does the Church Stand on Immigration?” United Evangelical Action ( June 15, 1957): 30–31. For correspondence relating to the article and mass mailing, see “Immigration Article” folder, box 34, Records of the National Association of Evangelicals, Wheaton College Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. 50. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 243. 51.  One exception to this general neglect has been work done by historians of international adoption. Arissa Oh, for instance, has shown that evangelicals played a key role in the institutionalization of international adoptions after the end of the Korean War. Evangelicals such as Bertha and Harry Holt saw the adoption of foreign children as important missionary work. They publicized the plight of Korean “war orphans,” promoted the adoption of these children within evangelical churches and communities, and lobbied Congress to allow such adoptions by making the necessary changes to U.S. immigration law. Arissa H. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Arissa H. Oh, “The Historical Roots of the Evangelical Adoption Boom,” The Historical Society: A Blog Devoted to History for the Academy and Beyond, October 11, 2013, http://histsociety .blogspot.com/2013/10/the-historical-roots-of-evangelical_11.html. 52.  Sparks to Ervin, June 16, 1964, folder 4473, box 101, Ervin Papers. 53.  Cating to Ervin, September 21, 1965, folder 5088, box 115, Ervin Papers. While Cating doesn’t give his religious affiliation, his views mirrored those of many evangelicals. 54.  Maddalena Marinari, “‘Americans Must Show Justice in Immigration Policies Too’: The Passage of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Journal of Policy History (April 2014): 219–45. 55. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 320. 56.  Ervin to Cating, September 23, 1965, folder 5088, box 115, Ervin Papers. 57. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” https://www .pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/. The Pew study was conducted in 2014. A 2016 study conducted by the Public Religion

124  Wendy L. Wall Research Institute found that roughly one-third of all American evangelicals are nonwhite. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “1 in 3 American Evangelicals Is a Person of Color,” Christianity Today (September 2017), https://www.christianitytoday.com /news/2017/september/1-in-3-american-evangelicals-person-of-color-prri -atlas.html. 58.  Julia Preston, “Evangelical Groups Call for Path to Citizenship in Immigration Overhaul,” The Caucus: The Politics and Government Blog of the [New York] Times, March 18, 2013, https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18 /evangelical-groups-call-for-path-to-citizenship-in-immigration-overhaul/; and Evangelical Immigration Table, “Press Release: Evangelical Leaders Implore President: ‘Reinvigorate the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program,’” July 23, 2019, https://evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/evangelical-leaders-implore-president -reinvigorate-the-u-s-refugee-resettlement-program/. See also Janelle S. Wong, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018). Wong suggests that the political impact of nonwhite evangelicals has thus far been muted because they are concentrated outside of swing states and have lower levels of political participation than their white counterparts. Both factors seem likely to change in the future.

CHAPTER 6

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth” How Liberals Revived and Revised the Case for School Vouchers in the 1960s and 1970s Mark Brilliant ★

On June 27, 2002, the United States Supreme Court delivered what veteran New York Times legal reporter Linda Greenhouse called the “most important ruling on religion and the schools” since its ban on prayer in the public classroom four decades earlier.1 By a single vote, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris upheld an Ohio law providing public dollars in the form of vouchers to families of low-income Cleveland City School District students who chose to enroll their children in private, including religious, schools within the district (as well as participating public schools in adjacent districts).2 The decision, observed Greenhouse’s Times colleague, Adam Nagourney, marked the realization of a “bedrock goal of the conservative movement.”3 To be sure, Zelman evoked the case for vouchers that iconic conservative economist Milton Friedman made in his seminal 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education.” Voucher plans adopted by states or localities, Friedman insisted, should not be confined to public schools. Schools run by for-profit “private enterprises . . . nonprofit institutions 125

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established by private endowment, [and] religious bodies” would all be available to parents who chose to redeem their state-funded educational chits at them. In Friedman’s scheme, the primary role of government in education—beyond transforming taxes into vouchers—would be to set “certain minimum standards” and then step aside for parents to pick from the panoply of choices that would supposedly sprout in the new, voucher-­ stimulated educational marketplace.4 Given this resonance between Friedman and Zelman, vouchers are often exhibit number one in contemporary discussions of “neoliberalism at work” in K–12 education, as one recent Daily Kos blog posting on “What is Neoliberalism?” described them.5 Articles in Salon, The Monthly Review, and Alternet add guilt to this association. Vouchers, they write, “were cooked up years ago by extremists who hate public education and are determined to get rid of [it],” like “Milton ‘Pinochet es mi Amigo’ Friedman,” his acolytes in “right-wing think tanks,” and George W. Bush.6 This popular perspective posits a straight historical line connecting Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan to Zelman to what educational historian Diane Ravitch described in 2014 as an “alarming” proliferation of state legislation permitting vouchers to be redeemed at religious schools.7 From this perspective, the history of school vouchers, as educational historian Jim Carl writes, “provides a window with which to understand the evolution of American conservatism,” while their approval in Zelman represents a “triumph of conservative ideology,” as legal scholar Edwin Chemerinsky put it in 2004, echoing Nagourney.8 Curiously, however, despite these popular and scholarly associations of vouchers and conservatism, vouchers merit little, if any, attention in leading histories of the rise of the right in the post–World War II United States. Instead, the educational issues that animated conservatives in the quarter century or so after Friedman’s seminal essay involved progressive pedagogy, insufficiently anti-communist school board members, Supreme Court prohibitions of prayer in public schools, court-ordered busing to promote desegregation, and sex education. In response, conservatives sought to expand the reach of religious schools and secure ­tuition tax credits and tax-exempt status for them.9 This is not to say that vouchers vanished from the “mainstream,” as Ravitch claims, awaiting the day when Reagan would revive and popu-

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larize Friedman’s 1955 defense of them. Rather, the case for vouchers would take an ideological turn to the left during the 1960s and 1970s. As Christopher Jencks, who was then a fellow at the Washington DC–based progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies, observed in 1966, “The ideologists of private enterprise have, with the conspicuous exception of Milton Friedman, been comparatively slow to apply their arguments in behalf of private schools.”10 Instead, it was liberals—above all, University of California, Berkeley law professor John ( Jack) Coons and his former Northwestern University law student and eventual Berkeley colleague Stephen Sugarman—who were the most prominent advocates of vouchers (for private, religious, and public schools) during the 1960s and 1970s.11 As Coons and Sugarman noted in 1978, “The most recent wave in experimentation” involving educational vouchers “emerged principally from the poverty programs of the last decade” and was part of a broader effort to equip the “poor with more control over all aspects of their lives.”12 Years later, Yale law professor James Forman Jr. would describe Coons and Sugarman as “the intellectual deans of the voucher movement,” the center of voucher advocacy in the decades separating Friedman from Reagan.13 While Friedman’s vision of vouchers languished during the 1960s and 1970s, remaining a “decidedly minority perspective” in public policy circles, Coons and Sugarman “expand[ed] and diversif[ied]” the constituency for them, as Clint Bolick, chief pro-voucher litigator in Zelman, notes. They “adapted Friedman’s proposals to their own ends,” bending Friedman’s “economic efficiency and antigovernment” case for vouchers into an “egalitarian” one, as Sugarman describes Coons’s vision of school choice.14 In the process, Coons and Sugarman presented what veteran educational civil rights scholar and lawyer Gary Orfield describes as an “expansive vision” for vouchers that prioritized equity-oriented arguments over market-oriented ones, including a call for socioeconomic integration and school finance equalization.15 Their efforts, in turn, would provide an ideological rationale and cross-­ ideological political coalition-building model that conservatives would adopt in the 1990s when they took up in earnest the case for vouchers that would culminate in Zelman. If Zelman marked the realization of a “bedrock goal of the conservative movement,” as Nagourney claimed the

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day after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling, a good chunk of that bedrock was comprised of liberal stones. Long before Friedman would denounce Coons as an “egalitarian” for his vision of school vouchers—one that was, as Coons put it, “more inclined than [Friedman] toward government guardianship of equal access for poor and black families”—Friedman was a semiregular guest on a weekly radio talk show Coons hosted in Chicago. At the time of their first on-air exchange in the late 1950s, Coons was a young law professor at Northwestern while Friedman, who was nearly two decades older than Coons, was a well-established economics professor at the University of Chicago.16 Born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where he attended Catholic schools for the most part until he entered the local University of Minnesota branch, Coons had little in his background to suggest that he would become one of the leading figures in the two biggest transformations in American public education since the 1970s: school finance reform and school choice (of which school vouchers were a subset). Indeed, by his own admission, Coons knew “zero” about public education in 1961 when the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) approached him to contribute a chapter on school segregation in Chicago for its 1962 report, Civil Rights U.S. A.: Public Schools North and West.17 What he lacked initially in educational expertise, Coons made up for with conviction. He was an active member in the ACLU, a civil rights marcher in Selma, and, as one Northwestern colleague would describe him in the late 1960s, a “prominent layman in Catholic church organizations, especially those working for interracial harmony.” These included the Catholic Interracial Council, on whose board Coons served, and later in the 1960s, the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice.18 Though Coons’s work for the USCCR earned him the enmity of Chicago school superintendent Benjamin Willis, it drew the attention of the United States Office of Education (USOE), which commissioned him to conduct another study of school segregation in Chicago. Completed in 1967, this report noted the “overwhelming” segregation of Black and white students and the increasingly vexing challenge of doing anything about it in the face of the “exodus of whites” to the suburbs.

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Until housing segregation was uprooted across the Chicago metropolitan area—and that was not going to happen anytime soon—the report called for busing students, both Black and white, between city and suburbs to achieve school integration. “If racial integration is desirable for Negroes, it is equally desirable for whites,” and it can “only” happen on a “large scale” given “current population patterns in big northern cities like Chicago . . . on a metropolitan basis.”19 No sooner had Coons taken up the issue of school segregation than he stumbled upon the issue of school finance inequality. In his 1962 report to the USCCR, Coons drew attention to the “discrimination” in spending and quality between school districts and broached the subject of its constitutionality. “May a State surrender educational policy to the municipalities,” he queried about the practice of localities setting property tax rates whose revenues were based on property tax values, “if the inevitable result is discrimination which is more obvious than any existing within any individual school system?”20 Five years later, in his report to the USOE, Coons delved deeper into the matter. In Illinois, “the presumably irrelevant facts of each child’s address will largely determine the number of public dollars available to his education.” Not only were there “enormous” disparities in per-pupil expenditures from property-rich to property-poor districts, but there were also substantial differences in the efforts—as measured by property tax rates—those districts exerted. In general, the “poorer districts” tried “harder,” but, despite their extra efforts, yielded fewer dollars given their smaller property tax bases. Such “dollar discrimination,” in turn, served as a “powerful engine of [school] segregation,” as those with the means fled from city to suburb, where their children would “receive an education worth nearly twice the dollars and with a tax burden often considerably below Chicago’s.” In this way, school finance inequality was inextricably bound up with school segregation, and resolving the former would help redress the latter. Unfortunately, as Coons saw it in 1967, there was little hope for school finance reform through the “stultified” political process. Instead, “the remedy, if any, is in the courts.”21 Which is why Coons—and his coauthors, William Clune and Stephen Sugarman—dedicated their 1970 book, Private Wealth and Public Education, “To nine old friends of the children,” a reference to the justices

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of the United States Supreme Court who they rightly anticipated would soon hear a school finance inequality case.22 Though the seed for Private Wealth and Public Education had been planted during Coons’s work on school segregation in Chicago in the early 1960s, it sprouted when Clune and Sugarman began to collaborate with Coons after they matriculated at Northwestern’s law school in 1965. By the time they completed their manuscript, Clune and Sugarman had graduated and Coons had left Northwestern for the University of California, Berkeley, whose law school faculty he joined in 1968. That same year attorneys from the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation filed the case of Serrano v. Priest in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Drawing on Private Wealth and Public Education, which would become the guidebook for school finance litigators in the 1970s and 1980s, Serrano challenged the federal and state constitutionality of the “substantial disparities” in per-pupil expenditures that stemmed from differing property values from one district to another.23 As a remedy, Coons, Clune, and Sugarman called for what they referred to as district power (as opposed to dollar) equalizing. Equal efforts (i.e., exertions of power) made by districts—with those efforts measured by property tax rates—should yield equal funding per pupil in those districts regardless of the property value differences between districts. In other words, districts that taxed property at x percent should generate y dollars, with the state making up the dollar gap that an identical property tax rate would generate between districts with unidentical property ­values. Simply put, district power equalizing meant that “an equality of self-imposed tax effort” should result in “an equality of spending power” across school districts in any given state.24 As Serrano wended its way through the California courts, Coons and Sugarman participated in briefing and arguing the case and lining up various supporting (amicus) briefs.25 Their efforts helped prevail upon the California Supreme Court, which issued the nation’s first school finance reform victory on August 30, 1971. “We have determined that [California’s] funding scheme invidiously discriminates against the poor,” read the nearly unanimous (6 to 1) decision. “Affluent districts can have their cake and eat it too: they can provide a high quality education for

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”  131

their children while paying lower taxes. Poor districts, by contrast, have no cake at all.” Such a system of school financing was unconstitutional.26 As an alternative, the California Supreme Court pointed to a system of district power equalizing, positing what Coons referred to as the Serrano principle: equal property tax rates chosen by districts would yield equal property tax dollars regardless of unequal property values between districts.27 Senator Walter Mondale, chair of the United States Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, hailed Serrano as “the most significant and potentially far-reaching decision in education law since Brown v. Board of Education.” Indeed, Serrano (and the cases it inspired) would soon eclipse Brown as the main axis of educational civil rights making from the 1970s forward, with the former marking a “new era” in the quest to “provide quality education for millions of disadvantaged children,” as Mondale put it. Given these stakes, Mondale summoned Coons to DC at the end of September 1971 to testify before his Senate committee, noting, “The lawsuit you won in California is very central to the work of our committee and has developed a tremendous amount of national interest.”28 As evidence of that national attention, Village Voice and New Yorker writer Nat Hentoff sent a congratulatory note to Coons two days after the California Supreme Court handed down its Serrano decision. In it, Hentoff requested copies of Private Wealth and Public Education, as well as an article published the following year by Coons and Sugarman entitled “Family Choice in Education: A Model System for Vouchers.”29 Coons was happy to oblige, but he insisted that Hentoff approach school finance and school vouchers as intertwined. “They are all part of a seamless ­conspiracy,” Coons quipped, that he and his “much exploited former ­students” had been “running for the last five years.” Begging Hentoff’s indulgence to “corrupt” him a little more, Coons proceeded to take exception to a recently published Hentoff article that “showed altogether too much ACLU purity regarding vouchers that the poor might choose to spend in sectarian schools.” Though Coons feared his “old [ACLU] colleagues may now view [him] as a conscious agent of the Roman conspiracy” for his advocacy of such vouchers, he considered that a small price to pay for equipping the “poor” with the capacity to make the “same mistakes as the rich.”30

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Implicit in Coons’s exchange with Hentoff was a recognition that critics of vouchers tended to view them as ideologically incompatible with school finance reform. Certainly, this was how the NAACP juxtaposed the two shortly after the California Supreme Court ruled in ­Serrano in 1971. On the one hand, it praised Serrano as “another milestone in the historic struggle for equal educational opportunities for Blacks, Brown, other minorities and the poor.” On the other hand, it blasted vouchers as a boon for the rich and a bane to “the fundamental concept of the public schools as a melting pot where all ethnic groups come ­together and learn to be Americans.”31 David Selden, president of the American Federation of Teachers, took a similar view in his testimony to Mondale’s Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, lauding the thrust of Serrano while opposing vouchers as a scheme to “undermine public education.”32 For Coons, however, school finance reform and school vouchers were cut from the same progressive ideological cloth, and he seized the opportunity of the attention that Serrano brought him to demonstrate how. Though Coons had been summoned to the Mondale committee in late September 1971 to discuss Serrano, Mondale observed with some surprise how Coons’s prepared written statement “comes down very hard on the choice principle.” Yes, Coons replied, school vouchers, as he envisioned them, could “provide the poor and average man with an opportunity for his children to have a wide range” of educational options. Indeed, he could “imagine no more significant contribution” to “increasing the educational options available to the poor” than for Congress to take steps to promote vouchers. He continued, “It is an irony that fundamental law makes the family’s choice in education constitutionally ­secure from preemption by the state,” alluding to the United States ­Supreme Court’s 1925 Pierce decision, “yet practically available only to the wealthy.” After all, Pierce had only permitted attendance at private schools; it did not require the state to provide financial support to facilitate the capacity of those who lacked the money to exercise the option that Pierce permitted. “The eccentricity of this state of affairs is obscured by the habit of a century,” Coons observed, “yet this insistence that the poor take what we assign them in public education is but a convention.” By calling for a fundamental restructuring in public school financing,

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Coons testified, Serrano pointed to the possibility for an even more fundamental restructuring of school financing that applied to all schools, public and private (including religious). Vouchers were the tickets to this brighter future where the non-rich would no longer be denied those ­constitutionally protected “options in education that the rich take for granted.” Congress, he concluded in his testimony, ought to enact legislation to give those without means what those with means, like Coons himself, possessed: “the whole spectrum of school options,” which ­Serrano, even if successfully implemented, could not provide. To do otherwise would perpetuate a system of “educational freedom for the rich but compulsion for the poor.” University of Texas law professor Mark Yudof, a leading figure in educational law and advocate of school finance reform, concurred. Indeed, he expressed preference for vouchers over public school finance reform since the former placed educational decision-­making responsibility with the family, “where it ought to reside,” more so than the district (as in district power equalizing).33 At the core of the case Coons and Sugarman made for vouchers was the concept of “family power equalizing.” What district power equalizing was to school finance reform, family power equalizing was to school vouchers. The two ideas emerged alongside one another. However, family power equalizing appeared only in “outline” form in Private Wealth and Public Education. Following Serrano, however, Coons and Sugar­man would shift that balance in the opposite direction.34 Whereas district power equalizing said education funding should not be a function of district wealth, family power equalizing said that education funding should not be a function of family wealth. The “very intention” of family power equalizing, Coons insisted in 1970, is to “liberate . . . variation in spending [by families on schools] from the accident of family wealth”— just as district power equalizing sought to liberate variation in spending between school districts from the accident of school district property wealth.35 Similarly, whereas district power equalizing allowed for variations in property tax rates from district to district, provided that equal property tax rates yielded equal property tax dollars, regardless of property values, family power equalizing allowed for variation in amount of financial “sacrifice” each family was willing to make, provided that families making equal sacrifices (as a proportion of their income) received

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equal education dollars in the form of a voucher.36 Finally, both district and family power equalizing privileged the idea of “subsidiarity.” By this Coons and his collaborators meant “decentralized decision making” at the district (in the case of district power equalizing) or family (in the case of family power equalizing) level so as to promote “plenty of room for variety” without reinforcing the “accident” of family or district wealth.37 Subsidiarity would vest “more decisional power in the unit of society nearest the person affected” while seeking to offset the disparities in ­privileges associated with being born into a property-rich district or a wealthy family.38 In this way, as Coons explained to renowned educational sociologist James Coleman, “We are balancing freedom and equality.”39 With respect to the freedom side of this scale, vouchers “would ­permit (indeed encourage) private schools to compete in what would ­become an educational marketplace,” as Coons explained to California assemblyman John Vasconcellos in 1969.40 After all, “there would be little point in building a system” premised on family choice that then “frustrated” the choices available by restricting vouchers to public schools. In fact, Coons and Sugarman suggested, family power equalizing would obliterate the distinction between public and private schools. These, he maintained, were “not very good labels” given that vouchers would be publicly funded and given that many public schools—especially in pricey suburbs—were effectively private, with the cost of tuition simply built into the price of housing.41 Rather, “private and public management carries more of the flavor of the appropriate distinction. What is really at stake is the degree of difference in style and content that state-supported educational experiences be permitted to have.”42 With respect to the equality side of freedom/equality scale, Coons stressed it as a way to distinguish his vision of vouchers from Friedman’s. As Coons explained in 1971, his “value system . . . emphasizes freedom of choice for the poor.”43 As such, he opposed vouchers that took the form of either tax credits or lump-sum grants in equal amounts, regardless of family income, that could then be supplemented by those with the means to do so. The former would only benefit parents “rich enough to pay taxes” and were “worse than nothing,” while the latter would allow the well-to-do to “create ‘lighthouse’ schools upon the foundation supplied

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by the state.”44 They would, as well, Coons wrote Friedman, lead to “even more” segregation of students by family income.45 By contrast, vouchers premised on the notion of family power equaliz­ing would be “purged” of the “antipoor characteristics” of Friedman’s vouchers.46 As with district power equalizing, effort as opposed to wealth (i.e., district property values, in the case of district power equaliz­ ing, or family income, in the case of family power equalizing) would serve as the basis for determining per-pupil expenditures. “The point of our proposal is to prevent the Friedman effect,” Coons explained to an education school dean who mistakenly lumped the two very different voucher proponents together. “Additional spending” in family power equalizing “would entail an equality of additional effort by the family,” thus helping to ensure that “poor families” were not “denied higher aspirations simply because of their poverty.” To be sure, all families could choose to exert different levels of effort—that was the freedom side of the freedom/equality scale—but those equal efforts would yield equal voucher amounts—that was the equality side of the freedom/equality scale.47 In this way, family power equalizing vouchers offered an “egalitarian” response to Friedman’s emphasis on free market competition, efficiency, and disdain for government, as Sugarman would characterize the distinction years later.48 This egalitarianism was also reflected in the different degrees of government intervention Coons and Friedman were willing to condone in their voucher proposals, including with respect to what Richard Nixon described in 1971 as “by far the hottest domestic issue,” namely, school integration through busing.49 As that issue heated up, proponents of school finance reform—from both the right and left—often expressed preference for the redistribution of school funds generated through property taxes over the redistribution of students through busing; they privileged integrating dollars over integrating students.50 Regarding those on the left who leaned in this direction, the Washington Post noted how “northern liberals” were embracing school finance reform as a way to “stay ‘liberal’ without being in favor of busing.”51 Not so Coons and Sugarman. In Coons’s view, busing was a “bedrock requirement” of the voucher plan they proposed. After all, the parental power to choose among schools, which family power equalizing sought

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to maximize, as Coons put it, “becomes pure illusion unless the kids can get to schools.”52 To this end, Coons and Sugarman drafted what Coons described as a “model statute for stimulating racial integration through vouchers.” In addition, they filed an amicus brief in a Los Angeles school desegregation case (Crawford v. Los Angeles) urging what Coons called “integrating transfers to out-of-district or private schools.”53 For Coons and Sugarman, school finance reform, school vouchers, and school integration were tightly coupled rather than mutually exclusive. They were not alone. An Education and Urban Society review of five major voucher proposals afoot as of 1970 set Friedman’s apart from the other four, whose authors shared ideological points of view much more similar to one another and Coons and Sugarman than to Friedman. Jencks, for example, called for “tuition grants” as a means to “provide the poor with a real choice about the kind of schools their children ­attend”—public, private, or private-religious. At minimum, Jencks’s vouchers would be the equivalent of per-pupil expenditures in the local public schools, though Jencks also intimated that they exceed that baseline for poor kids with greater educational needs than their middle-class and above peers. Jencks also touted the virtues of his plan for promoting socioeconomic integration. They would contribute to the movement “away from the increasingly irrelevant tradition of neighborhoods schools” at a time when maintaining neighborhood schooling was often invoked as an argument against busing. For these reasons, Jencks believed his plan would appeal to members of the New Left and proponents of community action.54 In their “Proposal for a Poor Children’s Bill of Rights,” Theodore Sizer and Phillip Whitten espoused a voucher plan similar to Jencks’s, financed by federal funds (with antidiscrimination strings attached) and means-tested along a sliding scale. Subsidizing parents of the poor, Sizer and Whitten believed, would provide them with the “power to choose the kind and quality of education” their children receive. It would also promote “competition between schools, public and private,” which in turn would promote socioeconomic integration as those schools sought the extra dollars that came with students carrying means-tested vouchers.55 Providing “choice” to parents who could otherwise not afford it was also Coleman’s goal—along with greater socioeconomic integration that

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Coleman’s research found to “increase the achievement of children from weak educational backgrounds” without diminishing that of their peers from “strong educational backgrounds.” Coleman’s “open schools” plan would break up the “racial and class concentrations in large cities” by ­allowing students to travel from a home-base school to other schools or nonschool sites for different educational offerings, including those taught by educational entrepreneurs in various “contract centers.” These contract centers, Coleman believed, would promote educational innovation through competition. They would also provide poor parents with something denied to them in the current public system but available to their wealthier counterparts: “a freedom of choice as a consumer.”56 As voucher proposals such as these emerged, so, too, did voucher bills in state legislatures across the country. In March 1969, for example, California assemblymen Leo Ryan (D-South San Francisco) and William Campbell (R-Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would require the state to issue “vouchers to be redeemable by any public or private school” that met basic requirements set forth by the state, the first one of which would be “no ethnic discrimination.” Though the bill did not specify the value of the vouchers, it did indicate that it comported with the idea of family power equalizing, with “equalization of tax effort” yielding “equality of expenditure.”57 Ryan—a former teacher and superintendent—acknowledged that vouchers could end up subsidizing the rich at the expense of the poor. Yet, that was already occurring as a result of the “Rube-Goldberg system” of school finance in California (and elsewhere, for that matter), as Ryan described it, with its disparities in per-pupil expenditures between districts. “Properly written” voucher legislation could avoid this problem, just as it could “substantially diminish the present vicious and persistent problem of segregated schools,” which two decades’ worth of legislation and litigation had yet to accomplish. To this end, Ryan considered “a non-discriminating clause” to be an “absolute necessity,” inasmuch as it would “force many presently lily-white public school areas to seek racial balance” or forego their eligibility for publicly funded vouchers. At a time when California’s schools, in Ryan’s estimation, faced “problems never dreamed of” and in the midst of a “taxpayer’s revolt” (as reflected in a 70 to 46 percent reduction in approval of school tax elections between 1960 and 1970), Ryan championed vouchers as a solution.58

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So, too, did his counterparts in other state legislatures. A July 1969 report by the Commission of Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress noted the “large number of bills” requesting state aid for private-religious schools. For the most part, however, these bills, like the one proposed by Ryan and Campbell that same year, failed to pass.59 Despite the “truly astonishing” interest in vouchers, as Coons marveled in 1970, “the colossus is scarcely tottering.”60 California deputy attorney general Richard Mayers provided one explanation for why in October 1969. Though Ryan deemed bills such as the one he and Campbell proposed to be no more a violation of church-state separation than a military veteran using GI Bill dollars to attend Georgetown, Mayers held otherwise. The California constitution, he wrote in response to a query from a member of the assembly, “would prohibit all of the programs designed to aid non-public schools,” such as the one proposed by Ryan and Campbell.61 Like Ryan, Coons and Sugarman also invoked the GI Bill analogy in defense of the constitutionality of vouchers. In a 1978 Los Angeles Times op-ed, for example, they called for a “‘GI bill’ for children where the state subsidies go to the family—not the school district—perhaps as vouchers that could be cashed at any school the family chooses.”62 Coons recognized the “high hurdle” that such vouchers had to clear in court.63 However, he did not think it insurmountable. As he explained, alluding to a footnote in the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 Nyquist decision that would become the basis of Zelman nearly three decades later, the voucher plan he and Sugarman proposed would “probably withstand ‘establishment’ attack because it fits into the niche in the wall reserved for ‘general’ systems,” that is, those that do not single out religious schools as beneficiaries but rather permit families to choose between “all schools public and private.”64 However persuaded he was by this line of argument, Coons did not think the United States Supreme Court would be anytime soon. “It is not going to happen in our time” and would require a “fifty year campaign at least” until it did.65 With that long haul in mind, Coons and Sugarman shifted their focus over the course of the 1970s from school finance reform to school vouchers. “Our prior work,” wrote Coons in 1977, “speaks to providing resources more equitably; our present work speaks to providing choice.”66

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Though Coons acknowledged how these issues “can seem inconsistent,” they were, for him, intertwined, flip sides of the same coin of “providing more educational opportunity for underprivileged kids.” Indeed, if anything, vouchers/choice were the better means to this end. This was in part because it was not clear that poor kids would be the principal beneficiaries of school finance reform—poor kids did not necessarily live in property-poor districts—and in part because even if they were, in the absence of vouchers/choice they would still be limited to public schools in ways that their better-off peers were not. If “fiscal inequality and lack of personal liberty” represented the “principal problems of American education,” as Coons put it, the latter was the “more profound” of the two. Serrano and the litigation it spawned could help fix the “fiscal in­ justice . . . centered in the use of school authorities varying capacity to raise money.” But it would do nothing to resolve the problem posed by the fiscal injustice of the varying capacity of parents to raise money for their children’s education. “Those who can afford to buy education or are privately subsidized are permitted enormous liberty in style and ­content of education.” Those not so fortunate must accept what the state assigns them. This was “unjust” at the individual level and “destructive of the values of community” at the social level. As an alternative, Coons called for an education system that placed a premium on “personal choice” and that would, in turn, promote social “consensus, racial integration, and the child’s own development.”67 He and Sugarman spelled out the details of that system in their 1978 Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control.68 The book marked the culmination of over a decade of reflection about school vouchers/choice, one of the earliest expressions of which had appeared briefly in their 1970 book with Clune, Private Wealth and Public Education. Education by Choice sought a much broader audience than the “nine old friends of the ­children” —and other judges and legal advocates and scholars—Private Wealth and Public Education targeted. Newsweek used the publication of Education by Choice as an occasion to pose the question of whether vouchers would be given another—this time more successful—try as educational policy, after having gained little traction in the early 1970s.69 Coons and Sugarman thought so, especially in the wake of Proposition 13, which passed in the same year that Education by Choice was

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­ ublished. By establishing a uniform, statewide, 1 percent property tax p rate, Proposition 13 centralized (at the state level) property taxation. No longer would localities set their own property tax rates. This was precisely the outcome that Coons had feared might result from his efforts on behalf school finance reform. “The fallout from Serrano,” he wrote in 1971, “is very exciting and we are trying to help turn the initial reaction in the direction we think proper—away from centralization and toward small unit decision-making” in keeping with district power equalizing and subsidiarity.70 Six years later, on the heels of a follow-up Serrano decision, Coons cheered that the California Supreme Court had adopted “our standard” (i.e., district power equalizing) but worried that “such victories have their risks, e.g., a political effort to undo the result with a constitutional amendment” that would yield “a lot more centralization than I would prefer.” With Proposition 13, that fear came to fruition.71 With district power equalizing no longer a possibility, Coons and Sugarman turned their attention to family power equalizing, their other preferred route to subsidiarity (or, decentralization) in education.72 They sought to leverage the fallout from Proposition 13 to secure vouchers. As Coons put it, Proposition 13, which he voted against, “is beginning to make some of the voucher types think this is the time for a little politics.”73 To this end, they reconnected with Leo Ryan, the former Democratic California assembly member, who was now a member of Congress. Ryan had read Education by Choice, which resonated with his previous published work and state legislative advocacy for vouchers. Over dinner at Ryan’s invitation, the three voucher proponents decided to pursue a ballot proposition for vouchers that would mitigate the centralizing impact of Proposition 13—“a populist rescue from centralization,” as Coons characterized it, as well as an effort to afford “low-income families” private school options now that Proposition 13–driven budget cuts threatened to undermine the quality of public schools.74 To line up supporters, Coons reached out to Wilson Riles, Cali­ fornia’s superintendent of Public Instruction. Predicting an increase in race and class segregation in the state’s public schools as a result of the ­“leveling down” impact of Proposition 13, Coons touted the voucher initiative as a way to maintain “middle class” support for “publicly financed education,” while ameliorating Proposition 13’s impact on the

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poor. “In the past,” Coons added, “you have objected—very properly—to Friedman-type ‘vouchers.’” This initiative, however, was a “horse of ­another color.”75 Though Riles never came around, and though Ryan would be murdered on an airstrip in Guyana following a fact-finding mission to a San Francisco Peoples Temple settlement in Jonestown in November 1978, Coons and Sugarman forged ahead. Their efforts to “make California the first state to establish an entire system of voucher schools, including public, private, nonsectarian and religious,” as the Los Angeles Times described it in January 1979, soon attracted national attention.76 “After leading a legal revolution that helped change the economic foundation on which much of American public education was built, what do you do for an encore?” asked the New York Times about Coons and Sugarman. The answer? “Change the structure on top of that foundation” and, in the process, “become the two men the nation’s public-­education establishment dislikes most these days.”77 A Chicago Tribune article suggested that their voucher initiative could have “repercussions potentially even more far-reaching than the now-famous Proposition 13.” It also noted the ostensible irony of two “decidedly liberal law professors” who spearheaded the “milestone” ruling in Serrano now pushing a measure more typically associated with “conservatives” led by Friedman. Teachers unions pledged “all-out” opposition as they girded for what ­Albert Shanker called “the fight of the century.”78 Elsewhere, in a New York Times interview of him and Coons, Shanker framed the stakes in even starker terms: “The voucher issue . . . poses the question of whether there will be public education in America.”79 To promote their initiative—and gather the signatures necessary to qualify it for the ballot—Coons and Sugarman created an organization with the same name as their book, “Education by Choice.” They reached out to potential supporters from across the ideological spectrum, seeking to build as big a tent as possible—civil rights leaders such as César Chávez and Jesse Jackson, Democratic politicians, Catholic school educators, California Taxpayers Association officials, and Milton Friedman. These overtures reflected the ways in which vouchers created “strange bedfellows,” as James Coleman put it in his foreword to Education by Choice, “defying classification as liberals or conservatives, or egalitarians

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or elitists.”80 The New York Times echoed Coleman. It described voucher proponents as “an unusual coalition of economic conservatives and political liberals,” with the latter compromising the majority of the committee organizing the initiative petition drive led by “civil rights activists” Coons and Sugarman.81 Coons agreed. “Our political support is neither left nor right,” he noted, “or, rather, it is both.” However, he added, it is also “thin”—too thin, in fact, to muster the requisite signatures to qualify the voucher initiative for the ballot.82 Coons and Sugarman anticipated opposition from teachers unions, which they received. Besides Shanker, for example, Ralph Flynn, executive director of the California Teachers Association, derided Coons and Sugarman as “a couple of well-meaning fools; they are not unintelligent, and therefore they are dangerous.” Their initiative, he added, was a “scam” that would reap chaos.83 Similarly, in a debate with Coons, the president of the San Diego Teachers Association linked vouchers with Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, the chief proponents of Proposition 13, as well “all the racist antibusing fans.”84 The NAACP also lined up against the initiative.85 Less anticipated, however, was the opposition the initiative encountered from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Congressman Ryan’s murder not only left Coons and Sugarman without a seasoned politician to help steer the campaign, but also cut them off from Democratic donors that Ryan might have been able to persuade. Absent that, Coons and Sugarman turned to libertarians, including Friedman.86 “What a stride for liberty it would be” if the voucher initiative was enacted, Coons wrote to Friedman, hoping to solicit his endorsement.87 Friedman, however, was not persuaded. He viewed the measure as overly regulated and overly egalitarian, reinforcing what Coons had written Sugarman about Friedman a year earlier, “Still no money. Milton Friedman is poisoning the right.”88 As early as 1970, Coons lamented the “disappointing” opposition to vouchers by the Catholic “hierarchy.” Such “disregard for parental responsibility” over Catholic school paternalism, Coons maintained, owed to “a fear that parochial schools would be vulnerable to competition.”89 Almost a decade later, little had changed. “Certain higher Catholic clergy,” Coons wrote to Father Virgil Blum, have been among “the big-

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gest roadblocks to our signature drive.” Coons then added, “They are an  eternal mystery to me. I sometimes wonder if we are in the same church.”90 Ted Sizer, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and current headmaster at Andover/Phillips Academy, expressed a similar sentiment about his colleagues in the independent schools. “One of the depressing aspects of the current scene,” he wrote Coons, “is the effort of the independent schools to sabotage the initiative with published misdescriptions. The truth is not in them.”91 Coons concurred, suggesting a reason for why. Shortly after coming up short of the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot, he wrote, “We got nothing from the ‘independent’ schools but hypocrisy. Most of them love the current situation and are doing all they can to stimulate the separation of the high wealth families from public schools and their less affluent clientele.”92 Coons’s observation would foreshadow George W. Bush’s off-therecord quip decades later about Republican suburbanite opposition to vouchers: “There are a lot of Republicans who don’t like vouchers. They come from wealthy suburban districts . . . and their schools are good.”93 Clobbered in California, vouchers also got clobbered in Congress. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote to Coons, his latest effort to secure congressional appropriation for grants to low-income students enrolled in nonpublic K–12 schools received the “lowest level of support we have yet had.” Opponents of the measures charged it with threatening to destroy public schools and discriminating against minorities and the poor. Such charges, Moynihan said, were baseless; they were “beyond hyperbole.” Yet, they stood “as a statement that can be made about this subject without appearing or intending to be extremist.” Despite well over a decade of advocacy, voucher proponents did not have much to show for their efforts. Nor did that appear to be changing anytime soon. As Moynihan explained, “The view is now firmly in place that support for students in nongovernmental schools is simply not compatible with a strong public school system.”94 It was, he could have added, reinforced by the view that any public support for nongovernmental K–12 religious schools was also unconstitutional—or so Flynn had insisted just a few months earlier. Part of the “scam” of the voucher initiative being pushed by Coons and Sugarman, as Flynn denigrated it, was that granting public dollars to religious schools would not pass constitutional muster, and “they [Coons and Sugarman] know it.”95

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Flynn was half right. Coons and Sugarman did not think their voucher proposal unconstitutional. They did, however, think it might take decades before their view of its constitutionality would be shared by the United States Supreme Court.96 When Zelman finally presented that opportunity, Coons and Sugarman seized it. They filed an amicus brief in the case as it headed to the Supreme Court, and Coons also helped Bolick recruit Coons’s colleague Jesse Choper, a highly regarded con­ stitutional law scholar, to draft an amicus brief that would be joined by some three dozen other law professors from across the ideological continuum.97 For Bolick, as well as legal scholar Forman Jr. and political scientist Terry Moe, the outcome of Zelman owed in good measure to the coalition of right and left that came together in defense of Cleveland’s voucher program. Bolick forged a group of “nontraditional alliances,” as he described it, by blending Friedmanesque libertarian arguments for vouchers with civil rights arguments for vouchers, maintaining that the principal effect of school choice was to “expand educational opportunity for people outside of the economic mainstream.”98 In so doing, too, he recapitulated arguments and tactics that Coons and Sugarman had begun pursuing in the 1960s.99 As Coons and Sugarman noted in their amicus brief in Zelman, “for more than thirty years amici have collaborated to advance the understanding of the legal and policy aspects of ‘school choice.’” At the heart of their effort had been the premise that school finance reform, initially, and school vouchers, subsequently, would help liberate children from the “accidents” of district or family wealth, as Coons put it in 1970.100 Three decades later, in their amicus brief in Zelman, Coons and Sugarman struck the same chord, this time joined by Bolick and the coalition he had assembled. “In America,” they wrote, “the family’s choice of its child’s school traditionally has been exercised either by securing residence in the attendance zone of the public school preferred by the family or by paying tuition to a private school. As a result, the school that any particular child attends often is determined by the wealth of his or her parents.”101 Though most liberals lamented the verdict, at least some, such as Matthew Miller writing in the Wall Street Journal, hailed Zelman as “an opportunity for the left to recast the voucher debate in ways that bring more money to poor schools,” which is precisely what Coons and Sugarman had long envisioned.102

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Despite Zelman, vouchers have proven much harder to implement than school finance reform. As Sugarman observed in 2010, while Coons “spearheaded” the campaign to reform public school funding that ultimately led over two dozen states to embrace either “full state funding” or “district power equalizing,” his efforts to do the same for vouchers did not yield the same results. “Still untried,” Sugarman continued, “is yet a further school finance reform [Coons] endorsed . . . : ‘family power equalizing.’” Well into his eighties now, Coons has not given up trying— and his defense of vouchers remains anchored in the same egalitarian principles that animated his efforts on behalf of them and school finance reform nearly half a century ago.103

Notes Special thanks to Darren Dochuk for inviting me to the vibrant conference out of which this paper grew, to Healan Gaston for co-paneling with me at that conference, to Darren and Sally Gordon for their astute comments and suggestions, and to John E. ( Jack) Coons for granting me access to his unprocessed papers and allowing me to interview him about the history he was so central in making, a slice of which I have hopefully faithfully recounted here. 1.  Linda Greenhouse, “Supreme Court, 5-4, Upholds Voucher System that Pays Religious Schools’ Tuition: Ruling in Ohio Case,” New York Times, June 28, 2002, A1. 2.  Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002). 3.  Adam Nagourney, “Supreme Court, 5-4, Upholds Voucher System that Pays Religious Schools’ Tuition: The Battleground Shifts,” New York Times, June 28, 2002, A1. 4.  Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, Economics and the Public Interest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), available online at https://www.edchoice.org/who-we-are/our -founders/the-friedmans-on-school-choice/article/the-role-of-government -in-education/. 5.  See JosephK74, “What is Neoliberalism?” Daily Kos, August 2, 2013, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/02/1228428/-What-is-Neoliberalism#. 6.  See “Creationism, at Taxpayer Expense: Secrets of the GOP’s Frightening New School Voucher Schemes,” Salon.com, February 3, 2014, http://www .salon.com/2014/02/03/creationism_at_taxpayer_expense_secrets_of_the_gops _frightening_new_school_voucher_schemes/; Pauline Lipman, “Neoliberal Education Restructuring Dangers and Opportunities of the Present Crisis,”

146  Mark Brilliant Monthly Review 63, no. 3 ( July–August 2011), http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07 /01/neoliberal-education-restructuring; Katie Halper, “7 Most Absurd Things America’s Kids Are Learning Thanks to the Conservative Gutting of Public Education,” Alternet, February 27, 2014, https://www.alternet.org/2014/02/7-most -absurd-things-americas-kids-are-learning-thanks-conservative-gutting-public/. 7.  Diane Ravitch, “What Voucher Schools Are Teaching,” March 9, 2014, https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/09/what-voucher-schools-are-teaching/. For a brief history of school vouchers that begins with Friedman and then lapses “far outside the mainstream” before being brought into the mainstream by Ronald Reagan, see Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School S ­ ystem: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010), chapter 7. 8.  Jim Carl, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), xx. Erwin Chemerinsky, “Progressive and Conservative Constitutionalism as the United States Enters the 21st Century,” Law and Contemporary Problems 67 (2004): 53. 9.  See, for example, Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Christian Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2011); Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: Norton, 2010); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 10.  Christopher Jencks, “Is the Public School Obsolete?” Public Interest (Winter 1966): 22. 11.  Coons’s unprocessed private papers at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law will provide the main primary source base for this essay. 12.  John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 25. 13.  James Forman Jr., “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers: A Story of Religion, Race, and Politics,” UCLA Law Review 54 (2007): 568. 14.  Clint Bolick, Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003), 4. 15. Bolick, Voucher Wars, 4; Stephen D. Sugarman, “Jack Coons: School Choice Champion,” Journal of School Choice 4 (2010): 191; Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg, Educational Delusions? Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 20. 16.  John E. Coons, “Milton and I and the Evolution of School Choice,” ­redefinED, August 20, 2012, http://www.redefinedonline.org/2012/08/milton-and -i-and-the-evolution-of-school-choice/. 17.  Interview of John ( Jack) Coons by Mark Brilliant, July 23, 2012; Civil Rights U.S.A.: Public Schools North and West (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 1962).

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”  147 18.  John ( Jack) Coons to Nat Hentoff, September 14, 1971, box 6, folder Serrano Correspondence, John ( Jack) Coons Papers, University of California, Berkeley School of Law (hereafter Coons Papers); Robert Lindsey, “Men behind Voucher Debate,” New York Times, December 4, 1979; Victor Rosenblum to Edward Halbach, April 1, 1968, box 2, folder J. E. Coons Correspondence, Coons Papers. 19.  John ( Jack) Coons, “Final Draft—Working Paper on Reducing Segregation in the Elementary and High Schools of Chicago through Student Assignment and Related Programs,” August 16, 1967, box 8, folder Chicago Public Schools Desegregation, Coons Papers. 20.  See Coons to Joel Berke, December 3, 1973, box 1, folder 9/73–12/73 Correspondence, Coons Papers; Civil Rights U.S.A.: Public Schools North and West, 184. 21.  Coons, “Final Draft—Working Paper.” 22.  John E. Coons, William H. Clune III, Stephen D. Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970). 23.  Serrano v. Priest, Superior Court of the County for Los Angeles, No. 938254, “Suit to Secure Equality of Educational Opportunity Under the Equal Protection Clause of United States Constitution and California Law and Constitution,” August 23, 1968, Collection of Briefs, Pleadings, Memoranda, and Other Documents from Plaintiff’s Attorney in Serrano v. Priest Case, UCLA Law Library. In a review of Private Wealth and Public Education, legal scholars and school finance reform advocates David Kirp and Mark Yudof said that it “made all previous approaches to the subject ‘appear almost primitive by comparison’” (quoted in Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007], 205). A few years later, Denis Doyle, chief of School Finance and Organization at the National Institute of Education at the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, would describe Coons as “the moving political and intellectual force behind ­Serrano”; Doyle to Robert Hawkins, March 21, 1977, box 3, folder Doyle, Coons Papers. 24.  Coons to William Callison, March 12, 1970, box 1, folder John E. Coons 1970, Coons Papers. 25. The Serrano legal team “elected to frame their final appeal . . . as a test of the theories of John E. Coons” (Davies, See Government Grow, 201). See also Coons to Leonard McCullough, December 10, 1971, box 1, folder J. E. Coons 1971, Coons Papers: “In 1968 when the case [Serrano] was filed the lawyers for the plaintiffs used the original manuscript of our book; I believe they drew from it the one part of the complaint which survived as the Serrano principle. In 1970 and 1971 when the case was in the California Supreme Court, Steve Sugarman and I did a good deal of work lining up friends of the court. We briefed and argued the case before the court, and the court adopted our ‘Proposition I’ [i.e., district power equalizing] as the holding.”

148  Mark Brilliant 26.  Serrano v. Priest, L.A. No. 29820, 5 Cal. 3d 584, August 30, 1971. 27.  Senate Equal Educational Opportunity Hearings, pt.16B—Inequality in School Finance, 1971, 6881, available at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp .39015055570314;view=1up;seq=3. 28.  Senate Equal Educational Opportunity Hearings, pt.16A—Inequality in School Finance, 1971, 6601, available at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp .39015055570322;view=1up;seq=3. In her testimony, Sarah Carey of the Lawyer Committee for Civil Rights Under Law noted, “At last count, we figured that something like 43 lawyers in 26 states have either filed or are planning to file similar kinds of lawsuits.” Senate Equal Educational Opportunity Hearings, pt.16B, 6873, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055570314;view=1up ;seq=3. 29.  John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, Family Choice in Education: A Model State System for Vouchers (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1971). 30.  Coons to Hentoff, September 14, 1971, box 6, folder Serrano Correspondence, Coons Papers. 31.  Press Release, West Coast Region, NAACP, May 30, 1972, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Library. 32.  Senate Equal Educational Opportunity Hearings, pt.16B, 6740, http:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055570314;view=1up;seq=3. 33.  Senate Equal Educational Opportunity Hearings, pt.16B, 6851, 6890, http:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055570314;view=1up;seq=3. 34.  Coons to John Simon, November 14, 1968, box 4, folder Taconic, Coons Papers. 35.  Coons to Sharon Sosnick, March 25, 1970, box 1, folder John E. Coons 1970, Coons Papers. 36.  Coons to California Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, September 12, 1969, box 2, folder J. E. Coons Correspondence, Coons Papers; John E. Coons, William H. Clune, and Stephen D. Sugarman, “Educational Opportunity: A Workable Constitutional Test for State Financial Structures,” California Law Review 57, no. 2 (April 1969): 321: “The wealth against which the tax effort would be made is the family income per child. For each level of effort a specific level of spending would be permitted the family, which would be given some form of scrip for each child with which to purchase education. Given appropriate adjustment for marginal utility, cost of living, etc., equal tax efforts would give families of varying wealth access to schools of equal offering.” 37.  Coons to Shelly Weinstein, February 16, 1971, box 1, folder J. E. Coons 1971, Coons Papers. 38.  Coons to Roland Pennock, January 11, 1977, Box 4, Folder Nomos, Coons Papers. For more on “subsidiarity,” see Coons and Sugarman (1978), ­49–51: “This principle holds that responsibility for dependent individuals should

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”  149 belong to the smaller and more intimate rather than the larger and more anonymous communities to which the individual belongs” (49). 39.  Coons to Coleman, January 11, 1975, Box 1, Folder Oct., Nov., Dec. 1975, Coons Papers. 40.  Coons to California Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, September 12, 1969, Box 2, Folder J. E. Coons Correspondence, Coons Papers. 41.  As Coons put it in a 1979 New York Times interview, “Today we have gross economic and racial segregation because those who afford it will choose their residence where they have, in effect, a private school based on public money.” “Radical Change in the Schools: Two Views on Voucher Plan: John E. Coons Albert Shanker,” New York Times, December 30, 1979. 42.  John Coons and Stephen Sugarman, “Family Choice Systems: A Report to the New York Commission on Elementary and Secondary Education,” 1971, 26, 31, box 6, folder Serrano and Vouchers, Coons Papers. 43.  Coons to Raymond Decker, March 1, 1971, box 1, folder J. E. Coons 1971, Coons Papers. 44.  Coons to Stephen Arons, February 9, 1972, box 3, folder Arons, Stephen; Coons, Clune, and Sugarman, “Educational Opportunity,” 321–22. 45. Coons to Friedman, March 9, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, July 1978–March 1979, Coons Papers. 46. Coons, Clune, and Sugarman, “Educational Opportunity,” 321–22; Coons, Clune, and Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education, 260–61. 47.  Coons to Mario Fantini, December 16, 1976, box 1, folder Oct., Nov., Dec. 1976, Coons Papers. 48.  Sugarman, “Jack Coons: School Choice Champion,” 191. What the historian Gareth Davies has said about the approach of Coons, Clune, and Sugarman to school finance reform is equally applicable to them on school vouchers: “What stands out . . . is less their activism than their circumspection; their egalitarian instincts coexisted with an admiration for local control” (Davies, See ­Government Grow, 202). Ultimately, vouchers for Friedman, unlike Coons and Sugarman, were merely a means to the ultimate anti-statist end in education. They were “a trojan horse that would enable the gradual extinction of government-­run schools. ‘By permitting parents to supplement the voucher, it is possible to conceive of the system developing into one where the government contribution becomes less and less.’” Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 197. 49.  White House Tape Collection, December 7, 1971, Conversation 631-8, Richard Nixon Presidential Library. 50.  For more on this, see Mark Brilliant, “From Integrating Students to Redistributing Dollars: The Eclipse of School Desegregation by School Finance Equalization in 1970s California,” California Legal History 7 (2012): 229–43.

150  Mark Brilliant 51.  “School Revenue Crisis,” Washington Post, November 28, 1971, in FI, box 72, Richard Nixon Presidential Library. 52.  Coons to Sharon Sosnick, March 25, 1970, box 1, folder John E. Coons 1970, Coons Papers. 53.  Coons to Donald Erickson, March 20, 1978, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File August 1977. 54.  Jencks, “Is the Public School Obsolete?”; Ray A. Carr and Gerald C. Hayward, “Education by Chit: An Examination of Voucher Proposals,” Education and Urban Society 2 (1970): 179–91. 55.  Theodore Sizer and Phillip Whitten, “A Proposal for a Poor Children’s Bill of Rights,” Psychology Today 2 (August 1968), 59–63; Carr and Howard, “Education by Chit.” 56.  James S. Coleman, “Toward Open Schools,” Public Interest, no. 9 (1967): 20–27; Carr and Howard, “Education by Chit.” 57.  Assembly Bill 1201, March 24, 1969, in Coons, box 6, folder Cal. Legislative Voucher Bills, Coons Papers. 58.  Leo Ryan, “Voucher Systems: A Legislator’s View,” The Black Politician 3, no. 1 (1971): 89–92. 59.  Report in Coons, box 6, folder Cal. Legislative Voucher Bills, Coons Papers. 60.  Coons to Stephen Arons, April 16, 1970, box 3, folder Arons, Stephen, Coons Papers. 61.  Mayers to Assemblyman Vincent Thomas, October 1, 1969, box 6, folder Cal. Legislative Voucher Bills, Coons Papers. 62.  John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, “Education and Serrano: Three Ways to Do It,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1978; see also Steve Nash, “After Proposition 13, ‘Education’s a New Ball Game,’” Oakland Tribune, July 16, 1978. 63.  Coons to Derrick Bell, August 18, 1977, box 1, folder JEC Correspondence, July, August, September 1977, Coons Papers. 64. Coons to Fred Cassity, July 3, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological Correspondence, April 1979–January 1980, Coons Papers; see also Bolick, Voucher Wars, 4–5. 65.  Coons to James Higgins, July 18, 1977, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, August 1976–July 1977, Coons Papers. 66.  Coons to Gottfried Dietzel, February 24, 1977, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, August 1976–July 1977, Coons Papers. 67.  Coons to Ruth Matheny, February 28, 1977, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, August 1976–July 1977, Coons Papers. 68.  John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 69.  “Another Try for Vouchers?” Newsweek, August 14, 1978.

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”  151 70.  Coons to John Bodnar, September 15, 1971, box 6, folder Serrano Correspondence, Coons Papers. 71.  Coons to Andrew Greeley, January 11, 1977, box 4, folder Greeley, Coons Papers. See also Coons to Douglas Martin, February 23, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, July 1978–March 1979: “Once Prop 13 centralized all total budget considerations there was nothing left of the rationale for spending different amounts per district—or even for tolerating a p ­ rolonged drift toward fiscal neutrality.” 72.  As Coons told the New York Times, “If you want to save local control, the way to do it is put the control in the family. The wealthy have local control, I tell you. That’s for sure, and we cherish it. I’m one of them. We use it for the advantage of our children.” “Radical Change in the Schools,” New York Times, December 30, 1979. 73.  Coons to Virginia Robinson, July 26, 1978, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, August 1977–; see also Coons in Steve Nash, “After Proposition 13,” Oakland Tribune, July 16, 1978: “I voted against it, I worked against it, but now it’s here and I’m going to take every advantage of it I can, to open up new options.” 74.  Coons (and Sherman Warner), draft of article, “Schools: Is Centralization Inevitable? Thoughts on How to Save Public Education,” September 6, 1978, box 3, folder Chickering, Coons Papers. 75.  Coons to Riles, September 19, 1978, and Coons to Homer Elseroad, February 7, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, July 1978– March 1979, Coons Papers. 76.  Jack McCurdy, “The Voucher: 18th-Century Idea Revived,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1979. 77.  Robert Lindsey, “Men behind Voucher Debate,” New York Times, December 4, 1979. 78.  Michael Coakley, “California Takes Aim at Public Education,” Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1979. 79.  “Radical Change in the Schools,” New York Times, December 30, 1979. 80.  Coons and Sugarman, Education by Choice, xii. 81.  Robert Lindsey, “School Voucher Use Faces Test on Coast: Proposal Would Have Public and Private Institutions Compete for Tax Revenue Money,” New York Times, August 5, 1979. 82.  Coons to Jim Furman, April 8, 1981, box 4, folder MacArthur Fd., April 8, 1981, Coons Papers. 83.  Robert Lindsey, “School Voucher Use Faces Test on Coast,” New York Times, August 5, 1979. 84.  Lanie Jones, “UC Professor Grilled on ‘Voucher’ School System: Controversial Proposal Would Give Families Money and Let Them Choose Where to Enroll Their Children,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1979.

152  Mark Brilliant 85.  Vernon Jarrett, “Blacks Who Want to Destroy Schools Have White ­Allies,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1981. 86.  John E. Coons, “A Little Context for Al Shanker’s ‘Original Charter School Vision,’” redefinED, September 2, 2014, http://www.redefinedonline .org/2014/09/a-little-context-for-al-shankers-original-charter-school-vision/. 87.  Coons to Friedman, July 2, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Correspondence, April–January 1980, Coons Papers. 88.  John E. Coons, “Milton and I and the Evolution of School Choice”; Coons to Sugarman, January 16, 1978, box 4, folder Sugarman, Stephen D., Coons Papers. 89.  Coons to Virgil Blum, October 13, 1970, box 1, folder John E. Coons 1970, Coons Papers. 90.  Coons to Virgil Blum, November 5, 1979, Box 5, Folder John E. Coons Chronological Correspondence, April 1979–January 1980, Coons Papers. 91.  Sizer to Coons, October 1, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological Correspondence, April 1979–January 1980, Coons Papers. 92.  Coons to Eugene Bleck, December 28, 1979, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological Correspondence, April 1979–January 1980, Coons Papers. 93.  Bush quoted in James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. 94.  Moynihan to Coons, July 25, 1980, box 4, folder Moynihan, Coons ­Papers. 95.  Robert Lindsey, “School Voucher Use Faces Test on Coast,” New York Times, August 5, 1979. 96.  In 1977, Coons estimated it would take half a century for the court to get to where it got a quarter century later. “Pierce does not require that public money be made available to support private choice in schools for those unable to afford it,” and “it is a fifty year campaign at least” before that will change. Coons to James Higgins, box 5, folder John E. Coons Chronological File, August 1976–July 1977, Coons Papers. 97. Bolick, Voucher Wars, 169–70. 98. Bolick, Voucher Wars, 11; Terry M. Moe, Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002)—the “regulated-­ markets” approach “tilted toward disadvantaged children” first advanced by Jencks and Coons and Sugarman “came to be the dominant force in the [voucher] movement’s dramatic growth” beginning in the 1990s (294, 371–72). James Forman Jr., “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers: A Story of Religion, Race, and Politics,” UCLA Law Review 54 (2007): 547–604—“voucher leaders sought to expand their constituency beyond libertarians and religious voters, and they chose minority residents in low-income areas as the most promising allies.” This “racial justice” defense of vouchers, they believed, was “their best response to an

“To liberate from the accident of family wealth”  153 Establishment Clause challenge” (566–67). 99. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also advocated a similar cross-­ ideological coalition in order for vouchers to begin to score success. As he wrote to Coons in 1980, “I continue to feel that eventual success depends in no small part on the Catholic and fundamentalist school groups making cause with you and other liberal spokesman for educational choice.” Moynihan to Coons, box 4, folder Moynihan, Coons Papers. 100.  Coons to Sharon Sosnick, March 25, 1970, box 1, folder John E. Coons 1970, Coons Papers. 101. Brief of Amici Curiae John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, ­Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, No. 00-1751, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 2001. 102. Matthew Miller, “The Liberal Voucher Opportunity,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002. 103.  See, for example, Coons’s regular blog posts at http://www.redefined online.org/author/jecoons/.

CHAPTER 7

An American Crusade The Religious Liberty of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union A ndrew Preston ★

There were many themes running through Barack Obama’s presidential rhetoric—hope, change, empathy, tolerance, pluralism—but one of the most prominent was freedom, and the responsibilities that come with it. Americans, he said time and again, shared a special heritage of political freedom, but they had to recognize, cultivate, and protect that heritage lest they see it ebb and disappear in the face of intolerance and injustice.1 Part of this responsibility was maintaining freedom even—indeed, ­especially—when it was difficult to do so. Among the freedoms Obama particularly stressed was religious liberty, also often known as the freedom of worship. “Our Founders understood that the best way to honor the place of faith in the lives of our people was to protect their freedom to practice religion,” he explained to American Muslim leaders at a Rama­dan dinner in 2010. “Indeed, over the course of our history, religion has flourished within our borders precisely because Americans have had the right to worship as they choose,” thanks to the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. “And it is a testament to the wisdom of our Founders,” he concluded, “that America remains deeply religious, a nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully 154

An American Crusade  155

and with mutual respect for one another stands in stark contrast to the religious conflict that persists elsewhere around the globe.”2 Of course, a message of religious-tolerance-through-religious-­ freedom had specific resonance for a gathering of American Muslims meeting at the height of the so-called war on terror, but Obama invoked it many times, to many different audiences, including when he spoke in international settings. It was a core part of his political thought, an aspect of personal liberty that was inseparable from others. “America will always speak out” for its “core principles” as expressed in the Bill of Rights, he proclaimed on his first trip to China, during a meeting with communist leaders in Shanghai. “We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don’t believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our Nation. These freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation, we believe are universal rights.”3 It also formed the core idea of his signature foreign-policy speech, in Cairo, in June 2009.4 Religious liberty as a cornerstone of general political freedom and democracy is a very old notion in American political thought, and it wasn’t unusual for an American president to embrace it. Yet many Americans, on both the left and the right, experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance when Obama rhapsodized about the power of religious liberty. He was, after all, a liberal Democrat, leader of a party that had begun to distance itself from organized religion. And many of his opponents, namely conservative Republicans, had castigated him as an irreligious man who was the first president to extend symbolically the First Amendment’s religious-liberty protections to nonbelievers. Newt Gingrich, for example, described the Obama administration as a “secular-socialist ­machine,” while Rick Santorum characterized Obama as “a president who is systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian ­values of America.”5 The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, went even further when he challenged Obama for the White House in 2012. “I don’t think we’ve seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we’ve seen under Barack Obama,” he flatly declared at a Republican primary debate. During a town hall meeting in Michigan, Romney criticized the Obama administration’s “secular agenda” and warned that the Democrats “have

156  Andrew Preston

fought against religion.” Later, the Romney campaign released a television spot claiming the Obama’s policies “declare war on religion.”6 Despite Obama’s open and effusive professions of the Christian faith, some conservatives—among them a future president, a future U.S. Senator, a prominent evangelical preacher, a powerful network-television pundit— even suspected him of being a secret Muslim.7 By the autumn of 2015, so did 43 percent of Republican voters.8 For the last four decades, religion has been one of the most divisive aspects of American politics. Ever since 1980, after Jimmy Carter disappointed his fellow evangelicals and Ronald Reagan presided over the marriage of the Republican Party to the Religious Right, religious adherence has been perhaps the most salient feature of the division between liberals and conservatives. More than anything else, it is what divides liberals from conservatives. In this sense, religion “belongs” to conservatives and Republicans, a way of identifying political ideology and partisan affiliation in contrast to increasingly secularized liberals and Democrats. It seems that while conservatives have kept alive that oldtime religion, liberals have begun to lose the faith. As the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016 demonstrated, this trend shows no sign of slowing down—indeed, if anything, it’s speeding up. According to a June 2012 poll conducted by the apolitical Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “partisan gaps in religious values have arisen over the past 25 years.” For example, 92 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats said they believe in God. But in 1987, the figures were much closer: 91 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats.9 In 2016 the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, set a new record by attracting 81 percent of the white evangelical vote while the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, set a new record low with 16 percent.10 The religious contrasts would seem to be even sharper in the realm of foreign policy, despite Obama’s powerful faith-based rhetoric in places like Shanghai and Cairo. Social issues have become a minor wedge issue in the politics of national security. For example, religious conservatives seek to make foreign aid contingent upon the rejection of abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, and upon the teaching of conservative sexual practices, such as abstinence before marriage. Perhaps relatively few Americans pay much attention to the intricacies of foreign aid, but those

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who do, on both sides, are passionate and well organized, and at times their voices have threatened to overwhelm other aspects of U.S. diplomacy in Africa and elsewhere. The promotion of religious liberty overseas is similarly contentious. Liberals are increasingly secular and so pay less attention to the fate of religions elsewhere, while those liberals who remain faithful rarely belong to a church that sends missionaries abroad. Religious conservatives are the exact opposite. Beginning in the 1960s, the number of liberal, mainline overseas missions plummeted; they were replaced by missionaries from conservative denominations in greater numbers than ever, and evangelical Protestants have dominated the American missionary movement ever since.11 Whatever the truth of these assertions, Republicans perceive religion, especially when it comes to foreign policy, as their issue. Following the example set forth by Gingrich, Santorum, and especially Romney, the Republican Party released its official 2012 election platform just a few weeks after Romney’s “war on religion” advertisement. Entitled “We Believe in America”—itself a subtle nod to Romney’s Mormon theology— the Republicans vowed that, in contrast to the Democrats, they would “support rights of conscience and religious freedom for military chaplains and people of faith. A Republican Commander in Chief will protect religious independence of military chaplains and will not tolerate attempts to ban Bibles or religious symbols from military facilities.” But religious liberty wasn’t simply a requirement for Americans; it provided the bedrock for democracy and international peace. To be at peace, therefore, was to spread freedom of religion. “To those who stand in the darkness of tyranny,” the platform’s foreign-policy section on human rights proclaimed, “America has always been a beacon of hope, and so it must remain. That is why we strongly support the work of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, established by Congressional Republicans to advance the rights of persecuted peoples everywhere. It has been shunted aside by the current Administration at a time when its voice more than ever needs to be heard” in China, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa—even in Europe. In contrast to the alleged secularism of Obama and the Democrats, a Romney administration would “return the advocacy of religious liberty to a central place in our diplomacy.”12 In a 2017 speech on international religious

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freedom, Vice President Mike Pence, himself an evangelical, vowed that the Trump administration would prioritize “reaffirming America’s role as a beacon of hope and life and liberty” after eight years of its neglect under Obama.13 There is, however, nothing particularly Republican—or, for that matter, Democratic—about the freedom of worship. In American diplomatic history, religious liberty has a rich, bipartisan, and complicated tradition that long precedes the more recent culture wars. It is the exclusive preserve of neither conservatives nor liberals, but it does have deep roots within American international thought. By way of illustration, this chapter focuses on one facet of religious liberty as both idea and practice within American diplomacy: the fate of Russian Jewry in the century from the Gilded Age to the age of Reagan. An examination of Jews demonstrates that religious liberty is not solely an evangelical, or even a Christian, concern. A long timeframe allows me to illustrate that the issue of religious-liberty-as-foreign-policy was consistent and not simply the product of highly charged historical moments that receive disproportionate attention; the standard example is the battle over détente in the 1970s. At first, the cause of religious liberty could have unusual sources—ironically, even religious bigotry. But as the United States assumed a more activist world role, religious liberty began to matter to a wide array of Americans because of the part it played in fostering liberal polities and democratic politics. The fate of religious liberty provided many Americans with a litmus test on matters of war and peace: where religious liberty thrived, states were likely to be peaceful; where it was suppressed, states were likely to be aggressive. This was a peculiarly American, faith-based version of democratic peace theory, and it provided increasingly internationalist Americans with a way to decode the wider world. As the long history of concern for Russian Jewry shows, our current era’s preoccupation with humanitarianism and human rights, even at the expense of national sovereignty, is neither novel nor secular. Americans cared little about Russian Jewry until the 1880s. Concerns emerged from two aspects of foreign relations that on the surface have little to do with diplomacy: trade and immigration. If the decade between 1861 and 1871 marked the rise of the industrialized nation-state— the United States, Japan, and Russia pursued internal reforms that paved

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the way for centralized political rule and rapid industrialization, while Italy, Germany, and Canada consolidated themselves into nation-states for the first time—the ensuing thirty years saw the emergence of modern globalization.14 With the increasing transoceanic circulation of goods, people, and ideas, Americans were brought into closer and more regular contact with the rest of the world. This meant that the United States was both sending more of its people abroad, usually as missionaries or merchants, and receiving greater numbers of foreigners, usually as immigrants. Many of these Gilded Age “new immigrants” were Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia. Pushed out by poverty and bigotry, Russian Jews were pulled to the United States by its religious pluralism, its relative degree of religious tolerance, and its pressing need for masses of ­unskilled labor. Unlike many other immigrant groups—for example, from Scandinavia or Italy—Russian Jews had no intention of ever returning home. As bad as overcrowded slums in Chicago, Newark, Brooklyn, and Manhattan could be, they were infinitely preferable to a life of pogroms and peasantry on the Russian steppe. Thus Russian Jews naturalized in large numbers. This is not to say that their assimilation into American life was smooth or straightforward, but simply that they quickly thought of themselves as Americans first and foremost who had ancestral but few other ties to their land of origin. However, the outward thrust of American commerce and the inward suction of immigrants overlapped in complex and sometimes combustible ways. Russian Jews had the right to naturalize and become U.S. citizens in their adopted country, but the Russian government did not recognize any such right to alter one’s national allegiance or citizenship, and it certainly did not recognize any rights, at all, for Jews, whatever their national citizenship. This became a problem when naturalized American Jews attempted to visit Russia on a U.S. passport. Sometimes they were denied entry to Russia. Sometimes, as in the cases of Henry Pinkos and Marx Wilczynski, they were threatened with immediate deportation even though they were in Russia as legal resident aliens. P ­ inkos, for example, was on business in St. Petersburg in April 1880 and was ­ordered to leave the country immediately; his possessions were seized, and he was forced to pay punitive costs for his own removal from the

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c­ ountry.15 Wilczynski was expelled under nearly identical circumstances six months later; the Russian authorities stamped his U.S. passport with the following declaration: “The bearer of this passport, a North American citizen, a merchant and a Jew, Marx Wilczynski, is forbidden to reside in St. Petersburg.” As one of the U.S. diplomats involved in the case pointed out, Wilczynski had been singled out “on account of his being a Jew by birth.” And given the harsh, often violent laws governing the treatment of Jews in almost all other parts of Russia—St. Petersburg had been considered a civilized oasis of relative tolerance—the stamp in his passport “practically neutralizes the value of that paper in Russia as an American citizen.”16 At least Pinkos and Wilczynski were allowed to leave (although the ordeal left Pinkos “penniless”). Another naturalized American Jew, Isaac Goldner, was not so fortunate. Born in Odessa in 1858, Goldner emigrated to the United States in 1872; he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served for five years before being honorably discharged. When he returned to Russia to visit relatives in 1881 (perhaps unwisely: Odessa and the surrounding region were home to some of the worst pogroms in all of Russia), he was arrested as a traitor and a deserter and conscripted into the Russian Army.17 Relations deteriorated further five years later when another traveler, a “Hebrew merchant of New York, a native-born citizen of the United States” who had never previously even been to Russia and was touring Europe on vacation with his family, was expelled from St. Petersburg simply for being Jewish.18 These incidents raised all sorts of highly sensitive concerns over ­extraterritoriality and sovereignty between two countries that had fundamentally different social and political systems. Russia and the United States had a commercial treaty, signed and mutually ratified in 1832, that had supposedly made such episodes impossible. And for nearly fifty years, they were. But the frequency and intensity of Russian anti-Semitism spiked in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and American Jews found themselves the deliberate targets of a semiofficial campaign against Russian Jewry. American diplomats protested furiously at the treatment of U.S. citizens who should by all rights have been protected by the 1832 treaty. Such incidents, complained Secretary of State James G. Blaine, were “absolutely inadmissible.” They were cases “in which the obligation

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of a treaty is supreme, and where the local law must yield.” But they were also perplexing; U.S. diplomats had never encountered anything like them before. As Blaine put it, “the banishment of our citizens from a friendly territory by reason of their alleged religion, is a new one in our international relations.”19 For the time being, then, U.S. diplomats were not to protest at the treatment of Jews on universal grounds of religious freedom, but as violations of the 1832 treaty protecting American citizens in Russia. “However much this Republic may disapprove of affairs in other nationalities,” Blaine’s successor as secretary of state, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, decreed a year later after reading accounts of anti-­Jewish riots in Russian-occupied Warsaw, “it does not conceive that it is its right or province officiously and offensively to intermeddle.”20 The sovereignty of the nation-state remained supreme and inviolable. Still, the robustness of the American criticism of Russia was remarkable. For one thing, there were not very many cases of American Jews being harassed in Russia simply because, as a U.S. official in St. Petersburg informed the State Department, “American Hebrews in Russia are very few” and were outnumbered by Jews holding German and British passports. For another, sovereign states simply did not criticize one ­another for their internal behavior, a custom that extended even when it came to the treatment of citizens traveling in a foreign country. As the St. Petersburg delegation also pointed out, Berlin acknowledged Russia’s complete internal sovereignty and did not issue any protests; London did protest, but diplomatically, in temperate language, and “without any ­disturbance of friendly relations.”21 At home, immigration presented a different set of problems. Russian Jews were attracted by America’s relative religious toleration, even if their new homeland was hardly free of prejudice, and while anti-­ Catholicism and anti-Mormonism loomed larger in nineteenth-century America, anti-Semitism wasn’t exactly unknown.22 Still, the persecution of American Jews remained at relatively low levels, not only when measured against Protestant hostility towards Catholics and Mormons but also (especially) in comparison to anti-Semitism in Europe. After the Civil War, however, the new immigration stirred what had been a fairly dormant anti-Semitic sentiment, which was stoked even further by the failure of Reconstruction, the imposition of Jim Crow, and the growth

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of forms of scientific racism that made forms of religious and racial prejudice acceptable, even respectable. Economic competition and religious and cultural prejudice thus combined to build resentment against American Jews. As the historian Leonard Dinnerstein puts it, “From the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States witnessed the emergence of a full-fledged antisemitic society.”23 In a curiously circular way that has become a hallmark of both globalization and its populist reaction, it was thanks to immigration that domestic anti-Semitism became a matter of foreign relations. And, ironically, it was thanks in no small part to domestic anti-Semitism that religious liberty became such an unusual presence of U.S. foreign policy. The reason was simple: whenever Russia persecuted its Jews, as it did on a regular basis in the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews sought to emigrate. Events in places such as Odessa thus had a profound impact on New York, Chicago, and elsewhere in America. With the Ottoman Empire resisting all Jewish immigration, Palestine was not yet an option, and few other European countries would offer asylum to Jews (Britain was an exception). The United States, on the other hand, was in the midst of one of the largest industrial booms in world history and had an in­ satiable need for unskilled labor. It also had fairly liberal immigration policy, with no quotas for Jews (and indeed, with none for any group until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907). So when religious violence erupted in Russia, Jews fled en masse to the United States, usually via London or Liverpool. “You want to keep the Russian Jews out of America, a wish which, according to me, you are right,” Edward Everett Hale, one of the nation’s leading religious figures, wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1901. The problem was that pogroms continued to roil the Russian countryside, which, Hale reminded Lodge, “will send a few hundred million more of them over here.”24 Or, as a Boston Globe editorial put it twenty years later, “No sooner did a savage Czar begin the persecution of the Russian Jews than they began to swarm our cities.”25 This in turn provoked resistance among some Americans. Russian Jews, it was argued, corroded American institutions and traditions and therefore undermined the basis of American democracy and prosperity.

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As the secretary of labor for the state of New Jersey complained in 1884, where “inferior races” such as Russian Jews were “brought into competition with American citizens the effect is to drive our people away, lessen the dignity of labor, and reduce the social status of the community.”26 This was not simply the product of a nativist, reactionary backlash among conservatives; Progressives also embraced anti-Semitism, just as they were sometimes proving to be effective architects of a segregated South. Senator Thomas W. Palmer, for example, was one of the earliest champions of women’s suffrage, among other Progressive measures. But in 1888, he was also an early champion of immigration restrictions, and he wanted to extend the exclusion of the Chinese to “unwholesome” Russian Jews who undermined “our free institutions.”27 Immigration restriction did not get very far, however, so advocates of Jewish control had to try something else. Looking for a way to deny freedom to Jewish immigrants, they stumbled upon religious liberty. Blaine and Frelinghuysen had been reluctant to criticize a fellow sovereign nation-state over its domestic affairs. But now it was apparent that those supposed domestic affairs had international repercussions. If the United States could pressure Russia (and countries with similarly brutal anti-Semitic records, such as Romania) to practice a greater degree of religious tolerance, they would remove probably the largest push factor in Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to the United States. In 1902, with anti-Semitism continuing to increase throughout Eastern Europe and Russia, Secretary of State John Hay codified this new approach in a significant (but mostly forgotten) set of instructions to American diplomats in Romania. U.S. officials were to remonstrate with their Romanian counterparts in unequivocal terms: the persecution of the Jews must stop. The United States, Hay explained, had always welcomed “voluntary immigration” by classes of people who could easily ­assimilate and “become merged in the body politic of this land.” But the United States would not be a dumping ground for “objectionable” or “obnoxious” undesirables. For this reason “the voluntary character of their coming is essential,” and the cruelty and “wretched misery” meted out in Russia and Romania, tolerated by the governments in St. Petersburg and Bucharest and actively encouraged by regional and municipal officials, made daily life unbearable. Jews were also not allowed to make

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a living, Hay charged, and what existence they were able to have was defined by a perpetual state of fear and poverty. Clearly, this left persecuted Jews with little choice but to flee to their only realistic destination: the United States. Hay therefore had a vested interest and a legal international right to meddle in Romania’s domestic affairs, despite the absence of a treaty between Bucharest and Washington.28 But Hay went further still. The treatment of Jews in Europe, he asked his representatives in Bucharest and St. Petersburg to stress, amounted to “wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples.” Hay would not only claim a legal right to violate another state’s national sovereignty based on narrow principles or petty concerns about immigration. Instead, he would also claim for the United States a universal moral duty to rectify injustices in the world, wherever they were. “This Government can not be a tacit party to such an international wrong,” he admonished. “It is constrained to protest against the treatment to which the Jews of Roumania [sic] are subjected, not alone because it has unimpeachable ground to remonstrate against the resultant injury to itself, but in the name of humanity.”29 Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, anti-Semitism and concerns about immigration continued to increase. A series of exclusion acts, culminating in the National Origins Act of 1924, tightened America’s previously loose immigration laws. And after the Wall Street crash of 1929, domestic anti-Semitism reached a crescendo during the economic misery of the Depression. Yet a curious thing happened to the role of nativism and anti-Semitism in U.S. foreign policy, especially as sources promoting religious liberty. From the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt onwards, Americans began to focus increasingly on humanitarianism and human rights as foreign-policy objectives in and of themselves. Within this greater degree of liberalism in foreign policy, religious liberty featured prominently. And within the crusade for religious liberty, the cause of Russian Jews surged to the fore. This concern largely resulted from the alarming deterioration of Russian Jewry itself. The pogroms of the 1880s resumed and escalated in the first years after the turn of the century. Atrocities occurred most frequently in the west, in Polish areas, and in the south, in the region surrounding Odessa in Ukraine. The worst pogroms in the Russian Empire

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flared between 1903 and 1906, around places like Kishinev, the capital city of Bessarabia province (what is now Chis, ina˘u, the capital city of Moldova), and Odessa.30 In 1914 a New York Times investigation was able to link the pogroms to official but secret encouragement by the Russian government, which had denied all involvement.31 Americans, however, had always suspected a link between the czarist regime and the violent anti-Semitism of the peasantry, and the pogroms immediately prompted major outbursts of indignation and protest in the United States. When William Sulzer, a Democratic Congressman from New York, spoke about the horrors of Kishinev, his emotion was not unusual. Despite the protests of the civilized world, he railed, “the murders go on. A veritable reign of terror exists. The black hand of ignorant fanaticism, race hatred, and religious bigotry has been raised throughout Russia against the law-abiding, peaceable, and defenseless Jews, and the barbaric work of rapine, plunder, outrage, and assassination continues and increases. . . . Thousands and thousands of helpless men, women, and children are being slaughtered before the very eyes of civilization, and not a power lifts its voice in protest or raises a hand in condemnation.” This was not entirely true—many voices were raised in protest in Britain and the United States, though neither London nor Washington was prepared to do much more than issue stiff protests. Sulzer wanted more. What good was imperial power—military, political, and ­economic—if it was not put to good use? The pogroms were an affront to the modern world, Sulzer charged, and had created “a big, blood-red page in human history—a gigantic crime against a common humanity— and Russia must be forced to stop it. How, do you ask? I answer, how were the butcheries in Armenia stopped? How were the cruelties in Cuba ended? What did the powers do in China? Russia can, if Russia wants to do it, end these atrocities in a day. They must be stopped.” This was the banner of progressive imperialism at full height. The crimes committed by the Turks, Spanish, and Chinese, Sulzer argued, had only been stopped by the military intervention of more enlightened great powers, such as Britain and America. Thus, in response to “massacres” that “cry out to high heaven,” the time had come “when the civilized world must tell Russia in no uncertain tones that these wholesale crimes against the Jews must cease, now and forever.” The right to interfere within the

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­ omestic jurisdiction of a sovereign state came from the moral repugd nance of crimes against humanity. “That right we have,” Sulzer concluded; “let us exercise it.”32 The expulsion, and sometimes arrest or violent persecution, of American Jews in Russia continued as well. The State Department was unable to extract concessions from the Russian government, which continued to refuse to recognize several international and treaty-protected rights the Americans considered axiomatic, especially the freedoms of movement and religion. In 1904, in the midst of the pogroms, Congress passed a joint resolution, passed unanimously by the House, demanding that Russia once and for all cease its harassment of American Jews.33 Later that year, in his 1904 Annual Message to Congress (a written missive now delivered orally and known as the State of the Union), ­Theodore Roosevelt openly—and, by the standards of conventional diplomatic niceties, highly unusually—rebuked Russia for not recognizing the American citizenship of naturalized Jews traveling on U.S. passports.34 Russian authorities ignored this hectoring from their great-power rival, and so in 1911 Congress, with urging from President William Howard Taft, unilaterally declared the 1832 treaty null and void.35 America’s emergence as a major world power coincided with its tightening of restrictions on new immigration. One development did not necessarily cause the other, though given the scale of government re­ pression of sedition, treason, and “un-Americanism” in the two world wars and the early Cold War, it is reasonable to assume that Washington’s new global role made Americans less willing to tolerate alien others in their midst. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 effectively brought an end to mass immigration from Europe, but Congress ensured the flow of immigrants would dwindle with a series of exclusion acts between 1917 and 1924. Even then, however, Jews held a special place in the nation’s attitude toward foreigners. For example, the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, imposed bans on certain classes of “undesirable” European immigrants and on most Asian immigrants. One of the methods of excluding certain classes of European immigrants was a mandatory literacy test (not coincidentally, also one of the methods of imposing segregation in the South). Supporters of Russian Jews, such as Alabama Representative George Huddleston, had few

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qualms in endorsing the literacy test because they ensured that the test could be taken in a language other than English, and most Russian Jews could read and write in both Russian and Yiddish.36 But advocates of Russian Jewry went one step further and inserted a religious-liberty clause into the bill; if immigrants could prove that they were in fact refugees specifically from religious persecution, they could not be denied entry into the United States.37 This deliberate anomaly, concocted as the United States was about to enter World War I and a period of severe domestic repression of dissent, was designed with European Jews in mind. That this was highly ironic—not least because many, if not most, of the targets of the 1919 Red Scare were Russian Jewish immigrants accused of importing Marxism, anarchism, and other forms of radicalism—should not obscure the fact that the fate of European Jewry (particularly in Russia and, later, the ­Soviet Union) became an important normative litmus test in U.S. foreign policy. When the United States rose to great-power status, it pursued an unusual foreign policy in that it was shaped by values as well as by geopolitics and economics. The United States may have been an imperial power, but it sought to build an informal empire of liberalism, based first and foremost on the right of individuals. This was certainly not a foreign policy of altruism or idealism. In an increasingly integrated world, remaking the world in an American image would also make for a safer, more friendly international environment. Threats would recede, and Americans would find themselves at the helm of a capitalist, free-trading world system. Thus, to the United States, more so than any other great power with the possible exception of Britain, the international status of individual rights mattered a great deal because it would identify potential friends from potential foes. Religious liberty was widely assumed to be a foundational individual right because it provided a baseline for all other rights. As Franklin Roosevelt explained at the outset of his 1939 State of the Union address, without democracy there could be no international peace, and without religion there could be no democracy.38 He followed this up two years later with the Four Freedoms, an articulation of America’s most elemental global objectives that included the freedom of worship.39 The persecution of the Jews, then, was an indicator of

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r­ epression, and repression was indicator of aggression. This faith-based version of democratic peace theory was peculiarly American, and it set the tone for American globalism in the entire twentieth century. Sometimes the emphasis on religious liberty could be specific and legalistic, as when Woodrow Wilson insisted that the new state of Poland, carved from the wreckage of devastated Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, enshrine religious liberty, specifically for Jews, in its new constitution.40 Franklin Roosevelt also focused on religious freedom as a key issue when negotiating the establishment of official recognition and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. While the Kremlin would never agree to cede ground on how it governed its own people, Roosevelt made sure that protections for the religious liberty of visiting Americans was enshrined in the treaty. He assured his critics at home, especially the legions of deeply anti-communist American Catholics who protested at the normalization of relations with the Soviet Union, that this was no minor concession, given the issue’s long sensitivity over the  previous half century. Moreover, he thought this one concession could pave the way for others by giving the United States a wedge that could pry open a more general relaxation of Soviet restrictions on individual rights.41 As Roosevelt’s difficulties illustrate, in the American imagination ­Soviet communism had replaced czarist despotism as the ultimate source of evil. Communism was of course fundamentally hostile to czarism, but there were thought to be as many similarities as differences between the two systems. While communism was officially atheist and thus hostile to all religions, czarism had established Russian Orthodoxy as the official faith, which then suppressed all other faiths in a manner similar to communist oppression. By the early twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church was so deeply mired in corruption and repression that many Americans thought it was only nominally a branch of Christianity. Thus, despite the special character of American anti-communism, perceptions of Russian/Soviet authoritarianism differed in degree rather than in kind.42 Nonetheless, communism presented special challenges to U.S. of­ ficials. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Roosevelt sought to extend Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union. When he did, he ran into passionate opposition from American Chris-

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tians, Protestant and Catholic alike. Just as Wilson could not join the war in 1917 allied to czarist Russians, Franklin Roosevelt found it difficult to persuade Americans to form a common front with the communist Soviets. Roosevelt tried to point not only to the 1933 negotiations over normalization but also to the fact that the 1936 Soviet constitution had formally codified the freedom of worship, but few Americans actually believed that the Soviet Union respected religious liberty. In the end, it mattered little, as the imminence of the Nazi threat overcame popular reluctance in the United States to aid the Soviet Union.43 During the war Stalin made symbolic overtures to the extension of religious freedom and other liberal reforms.44 In the meantime, after the State Department had initially branded the Nazis and Soviets as equals in the suppression of religion, Roosevelt applied his religious-liberty test to Germany and its brutality against the Jews. For now, when it came to the freedom of ­worship, the Soviets were (mostly) off the hook. After 1946, following the collapse of the Grand Alliance and the onset of the Cold War, the state of religious liberty in the Soviet Union— and, by extension, throughout communist Eastern Europe—reemerged for Americans as both a key indicator of threat and as a source of friction. During the “religious Cold War” under presidents Truman and Eisenhower, much of the focus was on the persecution of Christians behind the Iron Curtain, particularly Catholics (who far outnumbered Protestants in Eastern Europe and had a long history of opposing communist rule), but the plight of Jews also continued to draw Americans’ attention.45 Moreover, the anti-Semitism prevalent in earlier eras of American anti-communism virtually disappeared from the rhetoric of freedom in the Cold War at precisely the moment America’s Judeo-Christian “tradition” came to be celebrated.46 The recognition of Israeli sovereignty in 1948, prompted in large part by humanitarian pangs of guilt after the Holocaust, fit this pattern as well.47 Religious liberty was not a reliably perennial concern, however, even during the Cold War, and the plight of Soviet Jews was sometimes ignored by officials in Washington. When strategic interests mandated, normative goals such as religious freedom, including the plight of Soviet Jews, could be shunted aside.48 The Roosevelt administration, for instance, had downgraded religion once it was allied to the Soviet Union

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in the fight against Nazism. Such pragmatism returned during the era of détente, a policy of relaxing tensions with the Soviet Union implemented by two Democratic presidents ( John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) and two Republicans (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford). Lowering tensions with Moscow ruled out raising issues, such as the repression of ­Soviet Jews’ human rights, that would irritate Soviet officials. But the détente presidents had failed to consider, or at least take seriously, the popular resonance of the cause in the United States. The religious liberty (along with other fundamental liberties, such as the freedom of movement) of Soviet Jews proved to be an equally popular crusade among nongovernmental activists and members of Congress. In a twist that seems ironic only from the perspective of a later, more polarized era, two Republican presidents (Nixon and Ford) saw their signature foreign-­ policy achievement undermined and then sabotaged by mostly Democratic opponents, such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who championed the universal right of Soviet Jews to the freedoms of worship, conscience, and movement.49 After the era of détente, U.S. foreign policy under Ronald Reagan renewed its anti-communist offensive in the “second” Cold War of the 1980s. Once again, with the cause of freedom dovetailing with the demands of the national interest, the cause of Soviet Jews featured in Reagan’s battle cry.50 But the anti-Soviet crusade for religious liberty was no longer predominantly about Jews: now, the fate of Soviet Christians also came to the fore. The most notable case was that of the Vashchenkos, a family of Pentecostals from Siberia who took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after claiming religious persecution by Soviet authorities.51 The quiet resolution of the Vashchenkos’ status late in Reagan’s first term set the stage for the dramatic improvement of overall relations in his second, after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin.52 “We in our country share this hope for a new age of religious freedom in the Soviet Union,” Reagan declared on a visit to Moscow in 1988, when the end of the Cold War was already fully underway. “Our people feel it keenly when religious freedom is denied to anyone anywhere and hope . . . that soon all the many Soviet religious communities that are now prevented” from exercising it “will soon be able to practice their ­religion freely and openly and instruct their children in and out-

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side the home in the fundamentals of their faith.”53 Gorbachev’s liberalizing ­policies of glasnost and perestroika seemed like major steps in that direction. The end of the Cold War did not bring about an end to the bipartisan, interfaith basis of America’s spiritual diplomacy. True, the surge in conservative Christian activism in American politics was reflected in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In 1998 religious conservatives successfully lobbied Congress to pass the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) over the doubts of many in the Clinton administration. IRFA required a reluctant State Department to report on the status of religious liberty in foreign countries and report to Congress on which countries violated the freedom of worship of their own peoples. The State Department was already obliged to report on each country’s human rights record and called the abusers to account; beginning in 1998 it would also specifically monitor each country’s record on religious liberty. To facilitate these tasks, IRFA established an ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom and a small team in the State Department, as well as a dedicated member of the National Security Council staff, to monitor the state of religious liberty worldwide. Yet liberal Democrats have continued to follow the religious-liberty example set by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman decades before. For instance, Open Doors USA, an evangelical advocacy group for “persecuted Christians” worldwide, ranked California senator Barbara Boxer, one of the Senate’s most liberal members, second in in its most recent ratings, thanks in part to her championing of the rights of Christians and Buddhists in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.54 And as evangelical commentators such as Judd Birdsall, a former State Department official, have noted, President Obama himself showed a genuine depth of faith, a sympathetic regard for religion, and a willingness to feature religious liberty in his foreign policy.55 Conversely, critics such as Thomas F. Farr have charged Republicans (George W. Bush, Trump) as well as Democrats (Clinton, Obama) for having an equally insufficient regard for the freedom of religion.56 As a century of diplomatic history concerning the status of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia/the Soviet Union shows, the issue of religious liberty defies crude stereotypes of faith-based conservatives and secular liberals. The origins of religious liberty’s place within American

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diplomacy lie in the complexities of prejudice, immigration, and domestic politics as much as a promotion of ideals. The two presidents who placed probably the most emphasis on religious freedom as a key element of foreign policy, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, were liberal Democrats with progressive domestic agendas, while the president who did the most to shunt religion aside—in a highly religious era, no less— was Richard Nixon, a Republican who was the first to flirt openly with the massive political potential of conservative Christians. Even in recent decades, liberal Democrats have been active in the promotion of religious liberty as a foreign-policy prescription and objective. Religious liberty in U.S. foreign policy has a long pedigree regardless of which party has been in office. It will likely also have a long future.

Notes 1.  For the best analysis of Obama’s political thought, see James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 2. “Remarks at the Iftar Dinner,” Washington, DC, August 13, 2010, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb .edu/documents/remarks-the-iftar-dinner-1. 3.  “Remarks at a Town Hall Meeting and a Question-and-Answer Session in Shanghai,” November 16, 2009, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-town-hall-meeting -and-question-and-answer-session-shanghai. 4.  “Remarks in Cairo,” June 4, 2009, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-cairo. 5.  Gingrich quoted in Lexington, “Obama’s ‘War on Religion,’” The Economist, February 11, 2012, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2012/02/11 /obamas-war-on-religion; Quoted in Felicia Sonmez, “Santorum: Obama ‘Trying to Crush the Traditional Judeo-Christian Values of America,’” Washington Post, February 22, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics /post/santorum-obama-trying-to-crush-the-traditional-judeo-christian-values -of-america/2012/02/22/gIQAUZdzTR_blog.html. 6.  Romney quoted in, respectively, Michael A. Memoli, “Romney Says Obama Undermines Religious Freedom,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/22/news/la-pn-gop-debate-religious -freedom-20120222; Associated Press, “Romney: Obama Has ‘Fought against Religion,’” CBS News, February 22, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/news /romney-obama-has-fought-against-religion/; Rachel Weiner, “Romney Ad:

An American Crusade  173 Obama Waging ‘War on Religion,’” Washington Post, August 9, 2012, http://www .washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-obama-waging-war-on -religion/2012/08/09/192c4e02-e213-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html. 7.  Respectively, Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Franklin Graham, and Bill O’Reilly. See Jeva Lange, “Donald Trump Just Suggested Obama Is a Secret Muslim—Again,” The Week, June 13, 2016, www.theweek.com/speedreads/629806 /donald-trump-just-suggested-obama-secret-muslim—again; Andrew Kaczynski and Chris Massie, “Roy Moore’s Foundation Shared a Video in 2015 Calling Obama a Muslim,” CNN Politics, September 20, 2017, http://edition.cnn .com/2017/09/20/politics/kfile-foundation-for-moral-law-facebook-obama /index.html; Bradley Blackburn, “The Rev. Franklin Graham Says President Obama Was ‘Born a Muslim,’” ABC News, August 20, 2010, http://abcnews .go.com/WN/franklin-graham-president-obama-born-muslim-pew-poll/story ?id=11446462; “Photo of Obama in Muslim Garb Shows Deep Ties to Faith, O’Reilly Says,” Fox News, July 7, 2016, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016 /07/07/photo-obama-in-muslim-garb-shows-deep-ties-to-faith-oreilly-says .html. 8.  Peter Schroeder, “Poll: 43 Percent of Republicans Believe Obama is a Muslim,” The Hill, September 13, 2015, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing -room/news/253515-poll-43-percent-of-republicans-believe-obama-is-a -muslim. 9.  Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life Project, “Americans’ Religious Values,” June 7, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/06/07/americans -religious-values/. 10.  Jessica Martínez and Gregory A. Smith, “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis,” Pew Research Center, FactTank, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a -preliminary-2016-analysis/. 11.  See Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global ­History of American Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12.  2012 Republican Party Platform, “We Believe in America,” August 27, 2012, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2012-republican-party -platform, 43, 45. 13. Emma Green, “Protecting Religious Freedom Is a Foreign-Policy Priority of the Trump Administration,” The Atlantic, May 12, 2017, https://www .theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/religious-freedom-trump -administration/526320/. 14.  These phenomena have been covered extensively in various scholarly disciplines, but for good recent historical overviews see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945

174  Andrew Preston (­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 15.  For the Pinkos case, see documents 558–59, 561–62, 564–68, May 7– September 16, 1880, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1880–1881, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 873–82 (hereafter FRUS). 16.  Andrew D. White (Berlin) to John W. Foster (St. Petersburg), October 15, 1800, FRUS, 1881–1882 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 991. 17.  Foster to James G. Blaine (Washington), July 23, 1881, ibid., 1028. On the anti-Semitic violence, see I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990); and John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 18.  George Lothrop to T. F. Bayard (Washington), September 7, 1886, FRUS, 1886–1887 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 773. 19.  Blaine to Foster, July 29, 1881, FRUS, 1881–1882, 1033–34. 20.  Frederick T. Frelinghuysen (Washington) to Wickham Hoffman (St. Petersburg), April 15, 1882, FRUS, 1882–1883 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 451. 21. Alphonzo Taft (St. Petersburg) to Frelinghuysen, January 17, 1885, FRUS, 1885–1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 656. 22. A powerful reminder of American religious persecution is found in David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 23.  Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 35. 24.  Edward Everett Hale to Henry Cabot Lodge, December 16, 1901, Lodge papers, box 6, reel 16, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 25.  James Morgan, “Shall We Go It Alone?” Boston Globe, November 30, 1919. 26.  Charles Simmerman to Rep. Thomas M. Ferrell, May 11, 1884, 48th Congress, vol. 15, part 5, June 19, 1884, Congressional Record—House, 5363 (hereafter CR). 27.  Thomas W. Palmer, “Evils of Unrestricted Immigration,” January 24, 1888, 50th Congress, vol. 19, part 1, CR—Senate, 655. 28.  John Hay (Washington) to McCormick (Vienna), FRUS, 1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 43–44. 29.  Ibid., 44–45. Interestingly, Hay made a similar claim regarding the protection of Mormon missionaries in Europe and overseas European colonies. Mormon missionaries faced persecution even though they broke no laws in foreign countries and were harassed and attacked simply for preaching the Book of Mormon. Yet the Mormons often got into trouble in European countries that

An American Crusade  175 had an official established church or had similar constraints on religious liberty and freedom of worship. Nonetheless, Hay firmly sided with the Mormons and applied pressure from Washington to ensure their protection. See Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012), 188–90. 30. See Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906,” and Robert Weinberg, “The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study,” both in Pogroms: Anti-­ Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John Doyle Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 195–290. 31.  Kurt Aram, “Documents Which Uncover Official Crimes in Russia,” New York Times, June 14, 1914 (hereafter NYT ), SM9. 32.  William Sulzer in the House of Representatives, December 18, 1905, 59th Congress, vol. 40, part 1, CR—House, 562–63. 33.  Hay to McCormick, July 1, 1904, FRUS, 1904, 790. 34.  “Annual Message to Congress,” December 7, 1904, NYT, 3. For the exceptionalness of such a public criticism, see “President’s Criticism May Offend Russia,” December 7, 1904, NYT, 1. 35.  “Senate Affirms Treaty Break,” December 20, 1911, NYT, 1. 36.  George Huddleston, “Jewish Immigration,” March 30, 1916, 64th Congress, 1st session, vol. 53, part 5, CR—Appendix, 684–85. 37.  For the arguments in favor of the exemption, see the decisive debate in the House, February 1, 1917, 64th Congress, 2nd session, vol. 54, part 3, CR— House, 2443–2445. 38.  “Annual Message to the Congress,” January 4, 1939, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 1–2 (hereafter PPAFDR). 39.  “Annual Message to the Congress,” January 6, 1941, PPAFDR, 1940 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 672. 40. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 280. 41.  Ibid., 319–21. 42.  See John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: Knopf, 1978); and David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 43. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 353–61. 44.  See Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 45.  See, for example, Drew Middleton, “Anti-Semitism Seen Mounting in Russia,” NYT, February 13, 1948, 13; Harry Schwartz, “Soviet Jews Keep Religion in Secret,” NYT, January 20, 1951, 4; Andrew Preston, “The Religious Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective, ed. Philip Muehlenbeck (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), xi–xxii. Still, the fate of Soviet Jews

176  Andrew Preston has gone mostly unnoticed in the historiography. For otherwise outstanding works on religious anti-communism and U.S. foreign policy in the early Cold War that for the most part ignore Jews, see Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 46. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 471–72. On the emergence of the Judeo-­ Christian “tradition,” see Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 47. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 435–39. 48.  An argument I have made in greater detail in “The Spirit of Democracy: Religious Liberty and American Anti-Communism during the Cold War,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 141–63. 49. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 559–73; Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 103–26. On the overall tensions between geopolitics and human rights that helped define the era, see Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 50.  Reagan frequently referred to the plight of Soviet Jewry, albeit sometimes to Jewish audiences. For an example to a wider audience, see his “Remarks on Signing the International Human Rights Day Proclamation,” December 10, 1984, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency .ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-signing-the-international-human-rights-day -proclamation. 51.  Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 141–46. 52.  This at least is the conclusion drawn by the main participants to these events, including Reagan himself. See Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 558; George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), 165–71; Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents, 1962–1986 (New York: Times Books, 1995), 522–27, 532, 540; and Jack Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), xiv, 55–56.

An American Crusade  177 53.  Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Religious Leaders at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow,” May 30, 1988, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-religious-leaders-the -danilov-monastery-moscow. 54.  Open Doors USA, Congressional Scorecard for International Religious Freedom, first consulted at http://www.opendoorsusa.org/downloads/pdf-down loads/Open-Doors-Congressional-Scorecard-for-the-111th-Congress.pdf, now available at https://www.faithnews.cc/?p=8503; Tobin Grant, “Who Fights for Religious Freedom? Obama’s Ambassador Position Still Vacant,” Christianity Today, Politics blog, January 18, 2011, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news /2011/january/who-fights-for-religious-freedom-obamas-ambassador.html. In 2008 Boxer introduced the Vietnam Human Rights Act, which aimed to prohibit “nonhumanitarian development, trade, economic, and security assistance” to Vietnam until it removed restrictions on religious liberty, among other basic human rights: see Govtrack, S. 3678 (110th): Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2008, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/s3678/text. 55.  See the following selection of articles by Birdsall: “Santorum Wrong to Reignite ‘Freedom of Worship’ Controversy,” Christianity Today, February 29, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/februaryweb-only/santorum -freedom-of-worship.html; “Barack Obama: Evangelical-in-Chief?” Christianity Today, June 21, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/juneweb-only /barack-obama-evangelical-in-chief.html; “The State Department’s Great Leap Faithward,” Huffington Post, August 13, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com /judd-birdsall/state-department-faith-based-office_b_3744290.html; “Obama’s Religious Freedom Record is Strong,” Religion News Service, January 21, 2014, http://www.religionnews.com/2014/01/21/commentary-obamas-religious -freedom-record-strong/. 56. Adelaide Mena, “Religious Freedom Essential for Global Human Rights, Panel Says,” Catholic News Agency, March 4, 2014, http://www.catholic newsagency.com/news/panel-religious-freedom-essential-for-global-human -rights/; John L. Allen Jr., “Verdict on First Religious Freedom Report under Trump: Great Rhetoric, What Do We Do?” Crux, August 16, 2017, https://crux now.com/analysis/2017/08/verdict-first-religious-freedom-report-trump -great-rhetoric/. Farr, a former diplomat who now teaches at Georgetown University, has written extensively on the subject, but for a handful of representative examples see his “Diplomacy in an Age of Faith,” Foreign Affairs 87 (March/April 2008): 110–24; World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); “National Security Without Religious Liberty?” Berkley Center blog, June 7, 2010, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/national-security-without -religious-liberty; and “Our Failed Religious Freedom Policy,” First Things (November 2013): 35–40.

CHAPTER 8

God’s Spooks Religion, the CIA, and Church-State Collaboration M at t he w Av e r y S u t t o n ★

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.1 In the early years of World War II, the U.S. State Department asked all American personnel living near enemy lines in China to return home. Baptist missionary John Birch refused to leave. God, he believed, wanted him in Asia. For years Birch had worked with local Chinese communities. He knew their language, their customs, and the layout of their land. He soon put this knowledge to work—not just for God but for Uncle Sam. In 1942 his life took a dramatic turn when a squadron of bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle crashed in the Chinese countryside. The American airmen had taken off from a carrier in the Pacific, dropped bombs on Tokyo, and then flown toward safety in China, where they parachuted from their planes as their fuel supplies ran out. When Birch received word of the raid and subsequent crash, he rendezvoused with the soldiers and helped them navigate through enemy lines and to freedom. Birch’s performance impressed the Army and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They saw in Birch a loyal foot soldier who knew the Chinese language 178

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and understood the geography and politics of the region. They put him to work, baptizing him in the waters of covert operations. During and immediately after the war Birch provided the OSS with intelligence on Chinese communism while still fronting as a missionary. He was eventually captured by communists and killed, becoming the first “martyr” of the Cold War. He later became the inspiration for Robert Welch’s extreme right-wing, anti-communist John Birch Society. Birch’s work for the government revealed that religious activists could make extremely valuable contributions to American intelligence services. But his death also demonstrated the potential consequences of mixing faith with work for the U.S. government. This essay investigates the complicated relationship between the CIA and religion. Since its inception, the CIA has used missionaries and other religious activists for intelligence and espionage work; it has used religion as an effective propaganda tool, and its agents have even posed as clergy. CIA agents and religious activists managed to keep their partnerships mostly hidden until the 1970s. But in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, numerous journalists and then Congress began scrutinizing the agency more closely. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employing missionaries to further its agenda and that some religious activists were receiving substantial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and religious activists have long collaborated to achieve numerous policy goals. In recent years, historians of religion have worked to better embed their narratives in the rich and complex historical contexts in which their subjects acted, linking issues of faith and belief to the ebbs and flows of particular environments. Historians Jon Butler, Paul Harvey, and Kevin Schultz have called for better integration of religion into more “mainstream” American history. The case of missionary-CIA collaboration answers that call by demonstrating how important it is for scholars to understand the many ways that religion functions in ostensibly nonreligious spheres. In the specific case of intelligence and espionage, religion had tangible impacts on American covert activities abroad. CIA-­ missionary relationships highlight underexplored intersections between religion and foreign policy; they expose in new ways the complicated nature of church-state collaboration; and they offer fresh insights into the many ways in which religion functions in nontraditional spheres.2

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At the same time, historians have much to learn by probing how and in what ways individuals and religious groups have benefited from their cooperation with the government. The State Department has often helped missionary groups expedite visas and gain entry into new regions of the world in return for their collaboration. Some government agencies have also provided humanitarian ministries with cash, food, and other supplies, subsidizing and supporting their work. Missionaries have received equally valuable, even if less tangible, benefits as well: many have found satisfaction in the conviction that in serving Uncle Sam, they were serving God. Despite the official disestablishment of religion, these partnerships illustrate how the state can serve as a historical actor, substantially aiding, or substantially undermining, a wide variety of missionary ventures. Historians of American politics and foreign policy can also benefit from interrogating more closely the intersection of religion and covert operations. Religion has served as a popular propaganda tool for American spies for good reason. Policy makers have demonstrated by their actions that they believe that religion substantially influences individuals’ lives, impacts their decisions, and shapes their loyalties. Scholars should treat it equally seriously. In recent years, historians such as Andrew Preston, William Inboden, and others have demonstrated that religion did (and does) play an important, even if underacknowledged, role in foreign policy. Other scholars, such as Axel Schäfer, have explored the relationships between the state and various humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations. By focusing on the case of CIA-missionary relations, this essay adds another dimension to the important topic of public-private, church-state relations by highlighting important connections between the worlds of grassroots religious activists and American foreign policy.3 To make these arguments, this essay examines the CIA’s historic uses of religion, the controversy that such uses inspired in the 1970s, and, ­finally, the resolution of the missionary controversy, which was really no resolution at all. Religion has been much more fundamental to the mission of the CIA and to U.S. interventions abroad than historians have previously acknowledged, illustrating how closely entwined the United States’ mission to the world is with government leaders’ faith in the

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transformative power of religion to serve nationalist purposes. At the same time, various religious organizations have benefited in significant ways from their willingness to cooperate with the American government. Just months before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dispatched General William “Wild Bill” Donovan to a basement office in the White House with an important assignment. The president wanted Donovan to draw up plans for a new intelligence agency. The result was the birth of the Coordinator of Information (COI), a new office charged with keeping the president abreast of the latest developments as war raged in Europe and Asia. After Pearl Harbor, the White House expanded Donovan’s mandate, recognizing that the nation needed a first-rate intelligence-gathering agency. Shortly thereafter, the COI changed names, becoming the OSS. Donovan brought numerous prominent Americans to the OSS, including Allen Dulles, a well-connected attorney who had a passion for women, alcohol, and espionage. Serving as Donovan’s right-hand man, Dulles hired and recruited many of the initial leaders and agents of the OSS. He and Donovan particularly liked using missionaries for es­ pionage work. The spymaster recognized that missionaries, more than just about any other group of Americans, had proven language skills, knew how to build the trust of local populations, and had mastered the various geographies of the regions in which they had worked. Dulles was right. American missionaries proved to be essential sources of intelligence during World War II.4 Shortly after the war ended, President Truman abolished the OSS. But as the Cold War intensified, the president realized that the United States still needed an effective intelligence agency. In 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, which authorized the creation of the National Security Council and the CIA. The new agency had a broad mandate. Rather than simply serve as a research division for the president that could collect and analyze information from abroad, it acted relatively independently on the information it collected, seeking to change the course of world events. The agency’s vague mandate allowed it to function essentially as a clandestine paramilitary unit that to this day acts with little oversight.

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Leaders of the new CIA quickly realized that religion could serve as a major weapon in the nation’s Cold War arsenal. In fact, the nation’s most popular religious leaders were making faith central to the fight against the Soviet Union. Evangelicals such as Billy Graham constantly preached the evils of communism and encouraged Americans to remain steadfast in their support of their country. Many mainline Protestants, following the lead of Christian realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, supported the efforts of the U.S. government to commit “lesser” evils for the sake of promoting freedom and democracy at home and abroad. Many Catholics also proved quite willing to support the nation’s Cold War crusade. Joseph McCarthy, the Kennedy brothers, William F. ­Buckley, Fulton Sheen, and Francis Spellman all demonstrated that ­powerful individuals in the church and in politics were ready and willing to join—if not lead—the American holy crusade against communism. As secretary of state, John Foster Dulles also ensured that religion would be a key component of American foreign policy. A Christian realist, he doggedly committed to eradicating communism. With his brother running the CIA in the 1950s, there was no doubt that religion would play a substantial role in the American Cold War arsenal. Nevertheless, not all religious leaders committed to fight. Numerous liberal Protestants, Catholic pacifists, and members of historic peace churches worried that taking a hard line against the U.S.S.R. was not the right approach.5 At the same time that Truman and then Eisenhower encouraged Americans at home to revitalize their faith in the face of atheistic, communist aggression, the CIA encouraged religious revival abroad. A top-­ secret 1951 report made agency objectives clear. “The potentialities of religion as a cold war weapon against Communism are universally tremendous,” explained one intelligence analyst. “Our overall objective in seeking the use of religion as a cold war weapon should be simply the furtherance of world spiritual health; for the Communist threat could not exist in a spiritually healthy world.” The conviction that religion and communism could not coexist became a central component of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s.6 To this end, the CIA worked closely with religious activists, missionaries, and the children of missionaries in many regions around the globe. Unfortunately, the CIA has classified most operations-related materials.

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But we know that in the Middle East, missionary kids such as diplomat and spy William Eddy proved particularly valuable in helping craft relationships with oil-rich kingdoms. The insights of such individuals into the foreign cultures in which they were raised proved invaluable to the U.S. government.7 In Latin America it is even clearer that American clandestine services found religion to be an effective tool. Guatemala is one important site where the CIA’s faith in religion took shape. In the early 1950s, popular and charismatic president Jacobo Árbenz began a campaign for land reform, transferring thousands of acres of unused property from the hands of American corporations to local peasants. His actions directly threatened the United Fruit Company, one of the most powerful, well-­ connected U.S. corporations. The CIA launched a major campaign against Árbenz, linking him with communism and the Soviet Union. Religion became a centerpiece of the CIA’s extensive propaganda effort. The agency worked, as one policy directive explained, to “mobilize anti-­ communist activities of both Catholic Church dignitaries and of Catholic lay organizations and publications on a continuous and rapidly increasing scale.” To that end the CIA may have recruited Cardinal Francis Spellman to travel to Guatemala to encourage local prelates to issue a pastoral letter denouncing communism (and, indirectly, Árbenz).8 But encouraging indigenous populations to fight communism in the name of religion was not all the CIA was up to. Perhaps agents’ most ingenious move was to create an “Organization of the Militant Godless.” American operatives fabricated a series of letters that claimed to be promoting a communist revolution in Guatemala for the sake of advancing atheism. The letters accused the Catholic Church of working on behalf of the United States and the Vatican. “We are determined,” the letter explained, “to take a more active hand in cutting down the nefarious influence of the Catholic Church in Guatemala.” The CIA sent the letters to those Guatemalans who “might be likely prospects for an atheist organization, such as intellectuals, students, and officials of the various communist front organizations.” The agency then “leaked” the letters to anti-Árbenz journalists, church leaders, and politicians. The multipronged effort worked beautifully. In June 1954, a small “army” led by

184  Matthew Avery Sutton

rebel leader and American stooge Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala. Unwilling to take on the United States, Árbenz fled the country.9 The CIA also made masterful use of religion in Chile, recognizing the value of employing foreign religious leaders and organizations to serve the U.S. political agenda. In what eventually became one of the most well-known stories of the CIA’s use of a religious activist, the agency allegedly paid Belgian priest Roger Vekemans millions of dollars to build a Catholic anti-communist movement in Chile. His movement helped replace the leftist government of Salvador Allende with the Christian Democratic Party’s Eduardo Frei Montalva.10 The CIA also found religion to be a valuable tool in Vietnam. Rumors and speculation abound about the degree to which the agency employed religious activists on the ground. The most well-known example of CIA-activist collaboration involved Tom Dooley, a devout Catholic and medical doctor who worked with Vietnamese refugees and then established hospitals in Laos. While he was serving the local population, he was also helping the CIA keep tabs on popular sentiment in Laos and on North Vietnamese troop movements. Edward Lansdale, who led the early U.S. propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia, made religion—from fabricated astrological charts to an ad drive advising the North Vietnamese that the Virgin Mary was heading to the south—a key part of his effort to encourage the Vietnamese to resist communism. What impact, if any, these efforts had on the Vietnamese is still debated by scholars. But as the war escalated, more and more religious activists in Southeast Asia grew concerned. They feared that they were inadvertently becoming part of the U.S. government’s plan to win hearts and minds in Vietnam.11 Well into the 1960s, the CIA had mostly managed to conceal its ­actions in Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, and the Middle East. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, however, the public’s confidence in the CIA began to wane. Journalists began looking more closely at the nation’s clandestine services. For years the CIA had been able to plant or quash stories in the U.S. media with the willful cooperation of editors and publishers. Those days were rapidly coming to an end. Meanwhile, a new generation of socially conscious, politically progressive activists went overseas to help organize some of the world’s poorest people. The more that missionaries and humanitarians became aware of the United States’ role in indirectly and sometimes directly undermining democratic pro-

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cesses abroad and supporting exploitative political regimes for the sake of profit, the less willing they were to ignore the actions of the CIA. In 1966 the New York Times ran a major series on the CIA packed with revelations. Among them was the disclosure that deep cover agents routinely masqueraded “as businessmen, tourists, scholars, students, missionaries or charity workers.” A few liberal Protestant magazines took note of the piece. A writer in Christianity and Crisis, a publication launched by Niebuhr as a Christian realist alternative to the liberal Protestant and more pacifist Christian Century, acknowledged, “there are hints . . . that CIA agents have appeared in the guise of missionaries and that Christian groups have been used by the CIA.” The author doubted, however, that “even the most politically parochial and patriotic American working abroad for the Church would jeopardize the integrity of his commitment by serving the CIA directly.”12 In 1974, however, missions leaders were confronted by startling new revelations. Journalists broke the story of the CIA’s manipulation of religion in Chile to undermine democratic elections. United Methodist leaders attacked President Gerald Ford for allowing the CIA to run rampant in Latin America and called for their denomination to disassociate from the CIA. The Jesuit magazine America insisted that missionaries should not be “undercut by their own government, especially when that government operates for purposes and with methods of which most of its citizens would disapprove.” While some missionaries had pledged their full-fledged support to the Cold War and benefited from their ­loyalty, others wanted to keep their distance from the government.13 Congress was also taking note. In the aftermath of Watergate, American senators and representatives grew more aggressive in their oversight of various federal agencies. No longer willing or able to turn a blind eye, in 1975 the U.S. Senate launched a special eleven-member committee charged with investigating the CIA. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (aptly known as the “Church Committee” for its chair, Senator Frank Church of Idaho) interviewed 800 people and held 250 executive and 21 public hearings. The story that the committee eventually told was so damning that two of its members—Republicans John Tower and Barry Goldwater—refused to support the final report.

186  Matthew Avery Sutton

According to the Church Committee, the CIA had informed senators that the number of missionaries and clergy working for the agency at the time was minimal—“a total of 14 covert arrangements which involved direct operational use of 21 individuals.” The CIA paid most of these American missionaries to collect and provide intelligence. One person, however, helped preserve the “cover” of other agents. Most of the religious activists’ work, according to the CIA, was “directed at ‘competing’ with communism in the Third World.” In addition, the CIA funded the ministries of various groups deemed valuable for American intelligence purposes or for promoting the United States’ global anti­communist agenda. In other words, collaboration was a two-way street in which both sides had benefited.14 The senators investigating the CIA did not approve of the agency’s actions. Religion, the Church Committee solemnly assured the public, was “inherently supra-national. Making operational use of U.S. religious groups for national purposes both violates their nature and undermines their bonds with kindred groups around the world.” The committee, however, made no inquiry into or criticism of the CIA’s use of non-­ American religious organizations or the agency’s manipulation of religion itself.15 Although the CIA-religion revelation only garnered three pages in the Church Committee’s hundreds of pages of reports, the investigation fueled a controversy that had been growing for years. At the height of the Cold War, many Americans seemed willing to turn a blind eye to the actions of the CIA. But by the 1970s, things had changed. This story struck a powerful chord, revealing how torn many Protestants and Catholics were about how closely entwined their work in foreign fields was with the state. Just months before the Senate decided to convene the Church Committee, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks published The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. It contained one brief sentence on religion, most likely lifted from the 1966 New York Times report, which eventually received substantial attention. “In addition to official cover,” the authors wrote, “the CIA sometimes puts officers under ‘deep cover’ as businessmen, ­students, newsmen, or missionaries.” In an interview about the book, Marks told a reporter that the CIA “has been heavily involved in church

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activities, religious activities. They’ve infiltrated the church and used the church or church groups as funding mechanisms. They solicit information from missionaries, try to hire missionaries.”16 As the story gained steam, Marks claimed that in an informal survey of missionaries, 30 to 40 percent of those he contacted “either had a CIA-church connection story to tell or knew someone who did.” Marks then listed some examples of what he learned: that a Catholic bishop was working for the CIA in Vietnam; a missionary in India had been collecting information for the agency; a Protestant missionary in Bolivia sent the CIA regular reports about the communist party, labor unions, and farmers’ cooperatives; and another missionary in Bolivia regularly supplied the CIA with the names of suspected communists. Marks offered no evidence to support his allegations, and nobody ever questioned his claims. While his observations were almost certainly founded in some fact, they were so vague and unsubstantiated as to be almost worthless. Nevertheless, various religious news agencies publicized his allegations.17 A story documenting Marks’s claims in the National Catholic Reporter helped generate more attention to the CIA’s relationship to religion. “The growing awareness that the CIA has infiltrated the churches has placed church leaders on the horns of a Watergate-like dilemma,” Richard L. Rashke keenly observed. “If they do not own up to their CIAchurch connections, they will be accused of a cover up; but if they tell what they know, they will further damage their credibility, shock the ­sensibilities of Americans, and expose innocent people to the threat of expulsion, imprisonment, or even torture and death.” As the controversy unfolded, the Washington Post, New York Times, and other papers began examining the CIA’s missionary tactics.18 Americans expressed conflicting opinions about the revelations of religious activist-CIA partnerships. “The CIA holds nothing sacred including the sacred,” opined historian and columnist Garry Wills. “What we need, right now, is not so much a wall of separation between church and state but a wall between us and the CIA, to protect us from its imperial meddling.” Michael Novak disagreed. “I prefer a war fought through intelligence services to a war fought with atomic weapons.” He advised journalists and agency critics to back off and let the CIA do its business.19

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The leading Christian magazines weighed in as well. Editors had already been following the growing controversy over Vietnam and debating the issue of government support for humanitarian aid missions. So they were prepared to tackle the even more complex and controversial issue of CIA-missionary collaboration. Editors of the Catholic weekly America took a middle position, arguing that at times missionary-CIA collaborations, especially in the context of fighting communism, represented a positive good, but advising that church leaders should avoid the “tragic blunders” of the past. The liberal Protestant Christian Century ran a long piece by Gary MacEoin, an author and Catholic activist, about the damage the CIA had done to Latin American missionaries’ credibility. The evangelical magazine of record, Christianity Today, also covered the unfolding story. However the tone of its piece expressed indifference rather than outrage; evangelicals there had been more supportive of the war in Vietnam for longer than most of their mainline and Catholic counterparts. Since World War II, they had seen tremendous potential in working closely with the state to export Christianity, and they were less willing to criticize the government.20 Nevertheless, religious leaders all understood how important the issue was. Missionaries working abroad were always vulnerable, and the increasing controversy did not help. In 1964 a rebel group in the Congo had killed missionary Paul Carlson, whom it accused of spying for the United States. By the early 1970s, missionaries were regularly suspected of working for the U.S. government. Combined with the growing power of anti-colonial and liberation movements in Latin America and Africa, missionary work was becoming increasingly dangerous. Furthermore, the debate over CIA collaboration came in the context of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. At this historic event organized by Billy Graham and others for the purpose of rethinking missions, religious leaders from the global South critiqued American missionaries’ assumptions about other cultures. They also demonstrated that the core of Christian power was quickly shifting away from the West. American religious leaders were taking note. Many sensed that they could no longer afford to continue business as usual. In order to do effective evangelism, they had to ­decouple the gospel from the American way of life.

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Upon learning that the CIA had been using American religious activists for covert operations, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, an outspoken evangelical and Baptist, wrote Director William Colby to express his concerns. Colby, however, had no intention of restricting the ­agency’s use of missionaries. In many countries clergy, both indigenous and American, he explained, “play a significant role and can be of assistance to the United States through CIA with no reflection upon their integrity nor their mission.” He blamed the controversy on “sensational publicity” rather than the facts on the ground.21 Unsatisfied with Colby’s response, Hatfield then turned to President Ford, claiming that CIA involvement with clergy, members of religious orders, and missionaries “tarnishes the image of the United States in ­foreign countries and prostitutes the church.” In allowing the CIA to use missionaries, he continued, “we pervert the church’s mission and create the view that the United States will resort to any means in pursuit of its particular interests.” He ended by asking the president to take executive action to stop the CIA from using religious activists for American espionage. Once again, the senator did not get the response he was hoping for. Not only did Ford refuse to stop the CIA, his aide made things worse by telling Hatfield that “many” clergymen were engaged in regular communication with the agency.22 Hatfield then went public with his protest. He took to the floor of the Senate in late 1975 to denounce the CIA’s practices and the president’s refusal to discuss the issue. He claimed that church-state separation had been violated, adding, “In this country . . . the church is not an arm of the state, nor is the state the tool of the church. The first amendment and all our history . . . make that abundantly clear.” Having failed to convince the director and the president of the importance of classifying clergy as out-of-bounds for clandestine work, Hatfield introduced a new bill to outlaw federal intelligence agency engagement with religious activists “for the purpose of manipulating political events or collecting intelligence.” The legislation prohibited the National Security Agency, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency from paying “any member of the clergy or any employee or affiliate of a religious organization, association, or society for intelligence gathering or for any other participation in agency operations.” The bill also prohibited intelligence operatives from “so­ liciting or accepting the services” of religious activists.23

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Hatfield returned to the floor of the Senate again on February 5, 1976, to encourage legislators to act on his bill. He also inserted into the Congressional Record a series of letters protesting the CIA’s tactics from such theologically diverse American religious organizations as the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the Maryknoll Fathers, and the Church of the Nazarene. Other groups protesting the CIA policy included the Mennonite Central Committee and World Vision International, an evangelical organization that had previously accepted CIA money through a front group.24 In the wake of the CIA’s revelations, almost nobody thought that it was a good idea for Christian activists to work with the agency. For decades many Christians—though certainly not all—saw working with U.S. intelligence services as a worthwhile and patriotic duty. It also sometimes provided tangible benefits. But as Americans learned more and more about the agency’s actions in Chile, Guatemala, Cuba, and Vietnam, the CIA no longer looked like the right hand of a godly Uncle Sam, but instead like it might be an exploitative, manipulative, hypocritical tool of the devil. Missionaries risked undermining their hard work through ­association with the agency. As the church protests grew, Methodist missionary and writer Arthur J. Moore feared that Christians had oversimplified the issues. Echoing the Christian realist perspective developed by Niebuhr, he took to the pages of Niebuhr’s magazine Christianity and Crisis to call Hatfield’s legislative approach theologically “dubious” and “impractical.” He explained that try as American missionaries might, they could not step outside of their citizenship. They were subjects—legally and morally—of the American state. Whether activists were giving information to the CIA or leading demonstrations against the U.S. Consulate, whether they were working from the political left or the political right, they could not escape the tension between their religious calling and their very real ­citizenship in this world. Neutrality was an illusion.25 Others still hoped for greater church-state separation. Writing on behalf of a coalition of Baptists, James E. Wood called agents’ work with missionaries a “flagrant violation of the Constitution of the United States” that “profaned” religion. “The Constitution,” he asserted, “pro-

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hibits the U.S. government from using religious means for the accomplishment of secular ends.” Wood’s article highlighted the key issues that were beginning to emerge in the five-way discussion among the White House, the CIA, the press, church leaders, and Senator Hatfield. Americans, long committed at least in principle to the separation of church and state (no matter how fictitious actual separation was), seemed surprised that missionaries and other religious activists had such deep and complex relationships with the state.26 Many major denominations and missionary organizations supported Hatfield’s bill. Leaders of the liberal Protestant National Council of Churches vowed to fight “any allegation” that their overseas ministries were working with the CIA and advised member churches “to refrain from all contacts with C.I.A.” The Methodist church adopted a resolution that vowed to sever ties with any missionaries intentionally working for the CIA. The Assemblies of God, which had a large and active missionary outreach, quietly instructed workers to avoid CIA collaboration. However, church leaders did not want to go on record publicly against the CIA. They most likely did not want their loyalty to the government questioned.27 Sojourners, the magazine published by progressive evangelical Jim Wallis, also criticized the CIA’s practices. Editors printed a handful of the letters that Hatfield had received. They indicated that the problem of CIA-religious activists’ collaboration was, at least in their eyes, a serious one. Mel White, at the time a prolific ghostwriter for some of the nation’s leading evangelicals, wrote Hatfield that he had been approached by the CIA multiple times for information after trips abroad. When he refused to cooperate, one agent threatened him. “Who issues your passport, and do you think you’ll be able to maintain it if you don’t cooperate?” she asked. C. Peter Wagner, a professor of world missions at Fuller Theological Seminary, revealed to Hatfield that he had “first hand knowledge” of missionaries who had routinely cooperated with the CIA. The agency rewarded them with contributions to their ministries. Ralph R. Covell, a longtime missionary, had also encountered the CIA through his work in Asia. “It became apparent then to me, as never before, that there was danger of missionaries becoming what the Chinese Communists accused us of being—political agents for American imperialism.”28

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The protests of these missionaries, churches, and magazines, along with Hatfield’s threat of legislation aimed at curtailing the power and independence of the CIA, had an impact. When George Herbert Walker Bush took over as director of the CIA in early 1976, his first act was to forbid the agency from entering into “paid” relationships with American missionaries and clergy. Bush’s policy directive was pure genius. It appeared to provide much of what Hatfield and the major American denominations and missionary organizations wanted without actually doing much at all. Bush vowed that the “CIA shall establish no secret, paid or unpaid contractual relationship with any American clergyman or missionary.” “In addition,” he promised, “American church groups will not be funded nor used as funding cutouts for CIA purposes. The CIA will, however, continue to welcome information volunteered by American clergymen or missionaries.” Nevertheless, the CIA maintained the right “to initiate contact” with missionaries in the United States if senior agency officials believed that religious workers returning from abroad “might possess important foreign intelligence information.” Hatfield was satisfied with Bush’s promises. He returned once again to the floor of the Senate to laud the policy shift, share a series of warm letters that he and Bush had exchanged, and to withdraw officially his bill from consideration. The CIA was off the hook, allowed to continue its long practice of crafting and implementing its own policies without congressional oversight.29 Despite Hatfield’s enthusiasm for Bush’s policy, some of the more progressive and politically attuned Christian magazines did not buy what the director was selling. A writer in Christianity and Crisis feared that the American people had been “Bush-wacked.” The CIA, he asserted, had already moved beyond the kinds of paid contractual relationships described in Bush’s new policy. “Religious groups,” he wrote, “will receive nothing more than Bush’s prohibition of what is not occurring.” Christian Century editors believed that the CIA was making false distinctions. They saw no difference between CIA partnerships with American religious ­activists and with non-American activists, between soliciting voluntary collaborations with missionaries and hiring those missionaries for paid work, and between debriefing clergy at home and debriefing them in the field. “The moral universe in which world mission has meaning for the

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Christian church,” editors groused, was not “so compartmentalized.” The editors of Sojourners agreed. “While the American church may be gaining partial insulation against the attempted intrusion of the CIA into its mission,” the magazine editorialized, “nothing curtails the CIA’s forays into the church universal.” Bush’s policy shift required American religious leaders to decide where their loyalties lay. Was their mission to work toward keeping the global church pure, or simply to keep their own American ministries free of CIA taint?30 Although many religious leaders continued to lobby Bush for a more explicit policy change, the director well knew that with Hatfield pacified, the churches had no chance of undermining the power of the CIA. Soon the controversy died down. Without Congressional support, American church and missions leaders returned to business as usual. As CIA abuses receded from the headlines, they had less and less incentive to bring continued attention to the many ways that their missionaries and activists had helped support some of the United States’ most controversial global ambitious. But agency leaders were certainly not done with missionaries. In 1977 Bush’s successor at the CIA clarified in an undisclosed internal agency memo that Bush’s policy directive did not “prohibit overt relationships with missionaries or members of the clergy on matters which are unrelated to their religious status, such as the providing of unclassified translation services.” Apparently the CIA believed that it could still draw clear lines between what was religious and what was not. The agency, the memo implied, could keep missionaries on the payroll.31 Over the next few decades journalists, activists, and congressmen and -women occasionally revived the controversy, but it never again received such sustained attention. What nobody knew, however, was that Bush’s policy directive was not only almost meaningless, but also not even binding. In 1996 CIA director John Deutch testified before a Senate intelligence committee that although the 1976 ban on paid relationships with clergy was still technically in effect, he had the authority to waive the ban in cases of “unique and special threats to national security.” He revealed that since 1976 he and his predecessors had “arrived at the conclusion that the Agency should not be prohibited from considering the use of American . . . clergy in exceptional circumstances.”32

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Indeed, the CIA had masterfully built into its own policy a series of gaping loopholes that Congress never tried to close. Publicly the agency promised not to use American missionaries for covert operations or intelligence gathering. But privately the agency maintained the right to do just that if it believed that circumstances warranted it or if the missionaries were on American soil. The agency also felt free to distinguish between activists’ explicit “religious work” and their nonreligious work and believed that it had the right to hire them for the latter. Meanwhile, the agency never stopped or even denied using foreign clergy and missionaries to further its goals, nor did agents have any reservations about ­creating fictitious religious organizations to dispel propaganda. Across the second half of the twentieth century, the CIA found in God a useful, consistent, and powerful ally. In sum, missionaries have long played an important role as extensions of the American state. During World War II and the early Cold War, many missionaries proved willing to work simultaneously with both their nation and the foreign populations whom they served. But as the Cold War began to thaw, and more and more Americans began to question American foreign policy in the context of Vietnam, missionaries and church leaders grew increasingly embarrassed by some of the ways in which they had partnered with the CIA. Scholars need to better understand how and why this change occurred. The history of CIA-missionary collaboration illustrates in new ways the complexity of church-state relations in foreign fields. While there is much yet for scholars to learn about the way religion has functioned in American foreign policy, the history of CIA-missionary partnerships, the uses to which the CIA put religion, and the controversies that the CIA’s deployment of religion and religious activists provoked demonstrate that religion mattered in very tangible ways to U.S. policy makers and spies. Despite the CIA’s use of religion and religious activists, few church leaders or missions organizations have waged a sustained battle against the government. Indeed, many religious organizations substantially benefited from their work with state agencies. They have, however, required one thing from the CIA. The agency, which had long used missionaries for cover, needed to return the favor. American Christians decided in the 1970s that they needed the world to believe that they were .

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not agents of the CIA. Hatfield and Bush gave them exactly what they required. Little has changed since John Birch went to work for the OSS during World War II. But Christians now have an official, open CIA policy that gives them plausible deniability. They are no longer agents of the state from whence they come. Except when they are.

Notes 1.  John 8:32, inscribed on the wall at CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia. 2.  Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004): 1357– 1378; Paul Harvey and Kevin M. Schultz, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 78, no. 1 (March 2010): 139–62. 3.  Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012); William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Axel R. Schäfer, Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 4.  Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 10; see also Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, 2013). 5.  On religion and the Cold War, see Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-­ Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Preston, Sword of the Spirit; and Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Mark Thomas ­Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 6.  Memorandum, Paul C. Davis to Everett Glassen et al., October 17, 1951, CREST, CIA-RDP80R01731R003500170002-8. 7.  On Eddy, see Thomas W. Lippman, Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East (Vista, CA: Selwa Press, 2008). 8. “Dispatch HUL-A 576, April 28, 1954,” container 8A, entry A1 41: Records Relating to Activities in Guatemala, RG 263 Central Intelligence Agency, National Archives, College Park, MD. 9.  “Black Letter from the ‘Preparatory Committee for an Organization of the Militant Godless,’ HUL-A-875,” container 8B, entry A1 41: Records Relating

196  Matthew Avery Sutton to Activities in Guatemala, RG 263 Central Intelligence Agency, National Archives, College Park, MD. 10.  On Chile, see David E. Mutchler, The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1971); Norman Kempster, “Jesuit Priest: ‘I Got $5 Million Covert from the CIA,’” Washington Star, July 23, 1975; Richard Rashke, “Chile Connection: White House, Church, CIA,” National Catholic Reporter, July 29, 1977, 9–10, 16–17. 11.  On the use of religion in Vietnam, see James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Peter Hansen, “Bắc Đi Cú: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–1959,” Journal of Vietnamese ­Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 173–211; Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). On the debates among religious relief organizations in Vietnam, see Scott Flipse, “To Save ‘Free Vietnam’ and Lose Our Souls,” in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Grant Wacker and Daniel H. Bays (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 206–22; and Christopher J. Kauffman, “Politics, Programs, and Protests: Catholic Relief Services in Vietnam, 1954–1975,” Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 2 (April 2005): 223–50. 12. “How C.I.A. Put ‘Instant Air Force’ into Congo,” New York Times, April 26, 1966; Leon Howell, “Growing Up in America,” Christianity and Crisis, March 20, 1967, 50; see also “The C.I.A. Caper,” Christian Century, March 8, 1967, 301. 13.  United Methodist Communications NEWS, October 11, 1974, United Methodist Church Archives, Madison, New Jersey; “Missionaries and the CIA,” America, November 23, 1974, 314. 14.  Foreign and Military Intelligence Book I, Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 202. 15.  Foreign and Military Intelligence Book I, Final Report, 201. 16.  Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 1974), 255; “Q and A: John Marks Talks about the CIA,” Washington Star, May 13, 1975. 17.  Richard L. Rashke, “CIA Funded, Manipulated Missionaries,” National Catholic Reporter, August 1, 1975, 1. See also “Bishop Said Paid by CIA,” Washington Post, July 25, 1975. 18.  Rashke, “CIA Funded, Manipulated Missionaries,” 1. 19.  Garry Wills, “Church-State Relations Don’t Need CIA Meddling,” Washington Star, August 13, 1975; Michael Novak, “CIA War Preferable to Nuclear War,” National Catholic Reporter, August 1, 1975, 12. 20.  “Spies in Sacristy,” America, August 16, 1975, 61; Gary MacEoin, “How the CIA’s ‘Dirty Tricks’ Threaten Mission Efforts,” Christian Century, March 5,

God’s Spooks  197 1975, 217–23; Edward E. Plowman, “News: Conversing with the CIA,” Christianity Today, October 10, 1975, 62–64. See also Marjorie Hyer, “Clergy Wary of CIA Approaches,” Washington Post, August 5, 1975; Gary MacEoin, “U.S. Mission Efforts Threatened by CIA ‘Dirty Tricks,’” St. Anthony’s Messenger (March 1975): 33–37. 21.  Senator Mark O. Hatfield, “Prohibiting Federal Intelligence Agency Involvement with the Clergy,” Congressional Record—Senate, December 15, 1975, 40434. 22.  Mark O. Hatfield to President Gerald Ford, September 19, 1975, box 17, White House Congressional Mail Files, 1974–77, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI; Philip W. Buchen to Mark O. Hatfield, November 5, 1975, box 17, White House Congressional Mail Files, 1974–77, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI. 23.  Senator Mark O. Hatfield, “Prohibiting Federal Intelligence Agency Involvement with the Clergy,” Congressional Record—Senate, December 15, 1975, 40432, 40433. 24.  Senator Mark O. Hatfield, “Growing Opposition to CIA Contact with Missionaries,” Congressional Record—Senate, February 5, 1976, 2531; Kenneth A. Briggs, “Churches, Angered by Disclosures, Seek to Bar Further C.I.A. Use of Missionaries in Intelligence Work,” New York Times, January 29, 1976. 25.  Arthur J. Moore, “‘Render unto Caesar’: Missionaries and the CIA,” Christianity and Crisis, March 15, 1976, 42, 43. 26.  James E. Woods Jr., “From the Desk of the Executive Director: CIA Use of Missionaries,” Report from the Capital ( January 1976), 2. 27.  NCC statement quoted in Woods, “From the Desk of the Executive ­Director,” 2; Senator Mark O. Hatfield, “Growing Opposition to CIA Contact with Missionaries,” 2531; United Methodist Communications NEWS, December 29, 1975, United Methodist Church Archives, Madison, New Jersey; Journal of the 1976 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, vol. 2 (n.p.: United ­Methodist Church, 1976), 1569; Executive Presbytery Minutes, March 29, 1976, and World Missions Executive Committee, May 11, 1976, Assemblies of God, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, MO. See also United Methodist Communications NEWS, December 18, 1975, United Methodist Church Archives, Madison, New Jersey. 28.  “The CIA Letters (cont.),” Sojourners, March 1976, 7–8. 29.  Nicholas M. Horrock, “C.I.A. to Stop Enlisting Agents from the Press and the Church,” New York Times, February 12, 1976; Journal—Office of Legislative Council, February 19, 1976, CREST CIA-RDP78M02660R000300060064-0; Senator Mark O. Hatfield, “CIA Issues New Regulation on Contact with Missionaries Abroad,” Congressional Record—Senate, May 25, 1976. 30.  Leon Howell, “The CIA: Standing the Issue on Its Head,” Christianity and Crisis, March 29, 1976, 55, 56; Janet Karsten Larson, “Wolf in the Shepherd’s

198  Matthew Avery Sutton Frock,” Christian Century, August 18–25, 1976, 700; W. M., “CIA and Missionaries: Half a Loaf,” Sojourners, May/June 1976, 8. 31.  L. M. McCoy to Mark Hatfield, June 16, 1976, CREST CIA-RDP8801315R000100520001-9; United Methodist Communications NEWS, June 16, 1976, United Methodist Church Archives, Madison, New Jersey; James E. Andrews to George Bush, July 12, 1976, CREST CIA-RDP88-01315R000400260083-2; George Bush to James E. Andrews, July 22, 1976, CREST CIA-RDP8801315R0004000260082-3; “Missionary, CIA Probe Asked,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1976. See also Marjorie Hyer and William Gildea, “An Aura of Danger, Worldly Wisdom, and the ‘New Missionary’ Spirit,” Washington Post, March 3, 1977. “Behind the Lines, March 27, 1976,” Radio TV Reports, Inc., CREST CIARDP99-00418R000100110007-3; Stansfield Turner to Royal L. Tinsley, July 18, 1977, CREST CIA-RDP79M00983A001800030003-4. 32.  “CIA Use of Missionaries Resisted,” Christianity Today, April 29, 1996, 59; “CIA’s Use of Journalists and Clergy in Intelligence Operations,” Hearing ­before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, One Hundred and Fourth Congress (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996), 7. See also “CIA Recruitment and the Church,” Christian Century, March 13, 1996, 285; “CIA Wants Option of Recruiting Clergy,” Christian Century, September 11–18, 1996, 844.

PA RT I I I

Fait h- Based Ac t iv is m in an Age of Fr ac t ur e

CHAPTER 9

Catholic Women Religious in an Age of Fracture K at h l e e n S p r ow s C u m m i ng s ★

It would be difficult to find an organization situated closer to the nexus of religion and American politics than NETWORK, a lobby organized by Catholic sisters that seeks to apply church teachings on social justice to federal policy. Since its founding in the early 1970s, NETWORK captured only modest amounts of national attention. That changed in summer 2012, when the organization’s outspoken and charismatic leader, Sister Simone Campbell, led the “Nuns on the Bus Tour” around the United States to protest the federal budget proposed by another prominent U.S. Catholic, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. In the years since, Campbell, a member of a religious congregation called the Sisters of Social Service, has continued to tour the country with Nuns on the Bus, engaging Americans in spiritual dialogue about health care, immigration, voter participation, women’s rights, and polarization in politics. As Campbell has become an increasingly visible figure, she admits to experiencing a dissonance between her identity as a consecrated woman and her commitment to political and feminist activism. Only through prayer and self-scrutiny is Campbell able to ensure that the connections and influence that make her successful in the public square do not prove “toxic” for her spiritual life.1 201

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Obviously, for Campbell, reconciling her private religious life with her persona as a “celebrity nun” and a “high profile Catholic feminist” is a personal project.2 More broadly, however, Campbell’s story invites a reassessment of another arena in which faith and feminism are often ­considered to be in tension, if not perpetually at odds: in narratives of U.S. history. As Ann Braude has pointed out, historians of women and American politics are especially likely to minimize or ignore religion, tending to discuss it only when it surfaced as a roadblock in the movement for women’s rights.3 Braude suspects that the “culture wars” of the 1980s are largely responsible for the persistent assumptions about the incompatibility of ­religious belief and a desire for women’s advancement. From my perspective as a historian of women and religion it does seem that polarized perspectives on contemporary issues of gender and sexual morality obscure the fact that religious belief was often entwined with a commitment to w ­ omen’s political representation. The women who drafted the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls gathered in a Methodist church, after all, and suffragist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted the last fifteen years of her life to publishing a revised edition of the Bible from a feminist perspective.4 There is also substantial evidence that the female ­leaders of feminism’s second wave were also shaped and motivated by religious belief. In her efforts to historicize the presumed antagonism between faith and feminism, Braude has shown that many founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) had played leadership roles in Protestant churches, and that Betty Friedan, even while personally rejecting the Judaism of her childhood, continued to view religion as an arena of feminist activism and collaborated readily with fervent believers.5 Showing that many icons of American women’s history identified as or worked in partnership with religious believers is certainly one way to challenge the assumption that faith and feminism have been historically incompatible. It is also possible, however to challenge this fallacy from another angle, by showing that lesser-known women who were primarily associated with religious traditions—in this case, Catholic sisters—also embraced feminism and were shaped by it. NETWORK, which was founded at Trinity College, a college for Catholic women in Washington,

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DC, in 1971, offers a particularly illustrative example of how faith and feminism converged to transform women’s role in American politics in an era of widespread change. Focusing on a few of NETWORK’s founders, as well as its parent organization, the Conference of Major Superiors of Women, this essay argues that the Second Vatican Council—an ­epochal religious event rarely considered by historians of U.S. women or politics—reversed long-standing patterns in Catholic women’s history, primed Catholic sisters for feminism, and propelled them into American political life to an unprecedented degree. Sister Campbell and her predecessors have only recently emerged as the subjects of serious historical study. In a 1993 landmark article in American Quarterly, “On the Margins,” Leslie Tentler lamented the exclusion of Catholic subjects from mainstream American history. Tentler particularly singled out Catholic nuns as an egregiously understudied population, arguing that they had disappeared into a vast his­toriographical gap: Catholic historians ignored them because they were women, while women’s historians ignored them because they were Catholics.6 While great strides have been made to remedy this in the last quarter century, those who seek to integrate Catholic sisters into larger narratives of American history continue to face formidable obstacles. As historian Suellen Hoy shrewdly observed, “Obscurity and invisibility, though not uncommon in the study of women’s lives in general, are particularly trouble­some when they are sought after and considered measures of success.”7 The following anecdote about the founding of Trinity College, where NETWORK had its genesis, provides a particularly illustrative example of how Catholic gender prescriptions have worked to obscure the historical contributions of Catholic women. First proposed in 1897, Trinity became the first Catholic women’s college in the United States to be founded explicitly as a four-year institution (as opposed to making gradual transitions from a preexisting ­secondary academy, as most of the early Catholic women’s colleges did). This circumstance presented its founder, Sister Julia McGroarty, with a host of logistical challenges, including fundraising, assembling a faculty, designing a curriculum, and buying land. On this last count, Mc­Groarty’s purchase of a plot located just one-third of a mile away from the all-male Catholic University, which had opened in 1889, raised anxiety about

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c­ oeducation, a prospect feared by Catholic prelates. More ominously, McGroarty’s project became entangled with an ideological battle at Catholic University; the Holy See even banned McGroarty’s congregation, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, from working on Trinity for about six months while Church officials investigated the nuns’ alleged support of what many viewed as a dangerous heresy. McGroarty wanted to plead her case in person, vowing that if she were a man, she would “put on hat and go off to see the pope.”8 But that was impossible, as women at the time could only be represented at the Holy See through a designated male proxy. McGroarty initiated a persuasive letter-writing campaign, and she and other sisters relied on sympathetic male allies to mediate for them at the Vatican. The sisters eventually prevailed, and Trinity opened at last in 1901. Ten years later, an unidentified Sister of Notre Dame, when queried about the superior’s efforts to open the college, gave this response: ­“Sister Superior prayed and Trinity was started.”9 Though this statement was certainly not untrue—there could be no doubt McGroarty had prayed throughout the ordeal—it was nonetheless astonishingly abbreviated, to say the least. The source of the sisters’ reticence is revealed deep in ­Trinity’s archives, in a letter that McGroarty herself had written to all members of her community shortly after the college opened. In it, she passed along the counsel she had received from Reverend Philip Garrigan, vice-rector of Catholic University. Garrigan had reminded her that “like the dear Blessed Mother, the Sisters were chosen to do great things and like her too, they should be satisfied that He alone be witness of their cooperation with His grace. The Blessed Virgin did not publish her ­history to the world; neither should we be concerned whether people know what we do or not.”10 In heeding Garrigan’s advice and directing her sisters not to “publish Trinity’s history to the world,” McGroarty had simply been acting with humility, seeking to imitate Mary of Nazareth. There are a number of consequences to belonging to a religious tradition that has historically expected women to be far more self-effacing than men, and among them is the distortion of the historical record. In this particular instance, it would be Garrigan who proved to be the beneficiary of his own advice, as he and his fellow clerics at Catholic Uni­ versity are often characterized as the prime movers in the founding of

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Trinity College, credited for persuading the sisters to open a college instead of a secondary academy in the nation’s capital. This is in clear contradiction of archival evidence, which shows that a four-year college had been McGroarty’s intention from the start.11 This pattern recurs throughout Catholic history. In countless diocesan newspapers, parish histories, or congregational records, many of women’s services and achievements within the Church are credited to the “good father” or “dear bishop” who served as their spiritual adviser or local ordinary. Women religious also internalized this advice in their interaction with non-Catholic women. In her memories about the founding of NOW, for example, Friedan recalls that Sister Joel Ellen Read, a School Sister of St. Francis and history professor at Milwaukee’s Alverno College, was “particularly eloquent and commonsensible, breaking through the quibbling over details that could have kept the institution from being born.”12 Read herself, by contrast, does not even remember speaking at meetings, and considers her part in the founding of NOW to have been largely symbolic. Read’s failure to recall details about her role is likely a symptom of years of conditioning in convent life, in which she and other community members were exhorted to downplay individual achievements for the good of the whole. Shortly after NOW was founded, however, the directives of the Second Vatican Council would combine with the resurgence of feminism to compel sisters to speak for themselves and to have their achievements and contributions acknowledged—as Campbell and the majority of American Catholic sisters are manifestly determined to do today. Campbell and other contemporary Catholic sisters also differ from their counterparts in the early twentieth century in their attitudes to the broader American culture of which they are a part. Here again, the story of Trinity’s founding helps to illuminate the degree of change even as it provides another explanation for Catholic women’s persistent absence in historical narratives. McGroarty and other pioneering women religious who opened Catholic women’s colleges—there were fourteen Catholic women’s colleges established in the United States by 1910, and the number multiplied to one hundred twenty by 1967—had complicated relationships with their secular equivalents, denying their shared assumptions and at times cloaking actual collaboration. In planning for Trinity,

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for example, McGroarty visited each of the Seven Sisters, modeled ­Trinity’s curriculum on Wellesley’s, and befriended Bryn Mawr’s president M. Carey Thomas. But McGroarty never spoke publicly, and only rarely in private, about her friendship with Thomas, and insisted that Trinity was modeled neither on Bryn Mawr or Wellesley, but rather on her congregation’s institutions in Namur, Belgium, and on Saint Jerome’s school for women in fourth-century Rome! While this stance was undoubtedly strategic, in the sense that it helped insulate her from some criticism from Catholic clergy and bishops, it is also clear she was not being entirely disingenuous. McGroarty, like other Catholic women in the early twentieth century, envisioned herself as set apart from non-­ Catholic American women, especially those who worked under secular auspices. Seventy years later McGroarty’s spiritual daughters at Trinity would assume a very different posture toward American culture. In December 1971, the Sisters at Trinity hosted forty-seven other Catholic sisters representing more than thirty different congregations of sisters. The goal was to discuss sisters’ “untapped potential for influencing just legislation.” At the end of a weekend conversation, they collected $187 and organized a steering committee for what they originally called THE NETWORK. Emphasizing that sisters’ vows enabled them to lobby “without self-interest . . . placing them in a unique position to motivate others within the Catholic Church to assume a more civic responsibility,” NETWORK opened a two-person office in Washington, DC, the following April.13 In so many of its elements—cross-congregational collaboration, women-centered leadership, and the energetic leap into U.S. politics—the founding of NETWORK signaled a dramatic departure from previous patterns in American Catholic history. Catholics’ increasing political activism in the 1960s and 1970s is often attributed to their coming-of-age in America; having elected one of their own to the presidency, the argument goes, Catholics had finally laid to rest long-standing suspicions about their ability to be loyal Americans. The most decisive factor in changing Catholics’ attitudes toward American culture, however, can be traced not to a development in Washington but to an event in Rome. While U.S. Catholics’ allegiance to the pope did not, as many of their fellow citizens had often alleged, com-

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promise their ability to become full-fledged Americans, their ties to the Vatican did distinguish them from non-Catholic Americans in important ways and to varying degrees throughout periods of U.S. history.14 The 1960s and 1970s was a period when Rome exerted an especially strong influence on U.S. Catholics, as they used the decrees and language of the Second Vatican Council to redefine their relationship to American society. No group or institution within the American church did this more energetically or creatively than Catholic sisters.15 The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a meeting of the world’s Catholic bishops that took place in four separate sessions between 1962 and 1965, had come as a surprise to many Catholics. In January 1959, less than three months after his elevation to the papacy, Pope John XXIII ­announced his intention to gather the world’s bishops for an ecumenical council—the first such meeting in nearly a century and only the twentieth in the entire history of the church.16 In his opening address to the council on October 11, 1962, John charged the assembled bishops with aggiornamento, an Italian word that referred to the dawning of a new day in the church to reflect the changed conditions of the contemporary world. Though the pontiff himself did not live to witness the aftereffects of Vatican II—he died of stomach cancer in June 1963—he had nonetheless set in motion monumental changes that would alter Catholics’ understanding of themselves, both as men and women within the church and in relation to broader society, at a time of rapid social and political change.17 Like other reforms associated with Vatican II, efforts to “modernize” religious life actually predated the council. In 1954, for example, U.S. Catholic sister-educators founded the Sister Formation Conference (SFC) to encourage communities to share information and resources ­offered in their own colleges with a view to shortening the length of time it took the average sister to complete a baccalaureate degree. In 1956 U.S. Catholic sisters established a second collaborative body, the Conference of Major Superiors of Women (CMSW), which was intended “to facilitate dialogue and cooperation between superiors of women’s congregations in the United States.” Like the SFC, the CMSW built bridges across what had once been considered impenetrable barriers between religious congregations. While it had not been uncommon for sisters

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from different communities to offer each other hospitality and assistance for brief periods of time, sustained cooperative efforts were unprecedented until the mid-twentieth century. A sense of competition among congregations—often cultivated by the bishops who relied on their labor—precluded closer collaboration, as did the extensive religious formation within each community that emphasized its own unique charism or mission.18 In gathering congregational leaders together in annual national assemblies, SFC and CMSW laid the groundwork for the literal networks that sisters would establish after the council, such as the epony­ mous lobby, but also figurative networks in which Catholic sisters began to think of themselves more generically as “sisters,” as opposed to identifying exclusively as Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Sisters of Social Service, Sisters of St. Francis, Sisters of St. Dominic, or any of the hundreds of other congregations of vowed religious women represented in the United States. Despite these signs of change, the most influential figure in the transformation of women’s religious life was not an American, but a Belgian cardinal named Léon-Joseph Suenens. On the eve of Vatican II, Suenens published The Nun in the World, in which he made the case that all religious had an obligation to spread the gospel by direct personal action and that sisters should reform structures and patterns of religious life so as to engage more completely with the world beyond the walls of the convent.19 Suenens’s ideas, which corresponded with papal pronouncements on the subject, would later be incorporated into Perfectae Caritatis, the council’s Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life. Promulgated in 1965, Perfectae Caritatis stipulated that congregations should “renew” themselves by engaging in extended reflection on how the original vision of their founder would translate into the modern world. It directed each community of men and women to convene a special general chapter meeting (or legislative assembly), within three years, to engage in designated periods of experimentation and to rewrite their constitutions to permit them to respond to the call of the gospel in the contemporary world. In a dramatic departure from past practice, all members of the community were to be consulted in preparation for this. The search for renewal prompted most communities to implement a

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v­ ariety of structural changes. The strict rules that governed convent life became much less rigid, and community members were permitted more latitude in choice of ministry, living arrangements, and dress. As theologian Sandra Schneiders has argued, Vatican II exercised its most profound influence on religious life not through its explicit statements on the subject, but rather on its broader message about the entire church.20 Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), one of the council’s most important documents, redefined the Catholic church as the “people of God.” This characterization emphasized a horizontal rather than a vertical, hierarchical structure, thus undermining the long-standing presumption among Catholics that vowed religious were called to a holier life than that of the laity. Seeking to identify with members of the Catholic laity (which, as non-ordained members of church, they had technically always been), many individual sisters and communities made decisions that reoriented religious life. Many chose, for example, to live in apartments rather than convents, to revert to their given names (to emphasize their baptismal rather than vocational call), and to modify or even abandon the habit (which had established a visible distinction between sisters and the rest of society). Given the council’s emphasis on the call to holiness of all the baptized, the document instructed, “religious life could no longer be understood as an elite vocation to a ‘life of perfection’ that made its members superior to other Christians.”21 Gaudium et Spes (the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) was equally influential in renewing and changing religious life. Although the document runs to over thirty thousand words, its essence is communicated in its first line: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”22 The document’s strong social content prompted many American sisters to choose new forms of ministry and inspired them toward a commitment to civil rights and other social justice movements. In 1965 a number of U.S. sisters converged on Selma, Alabama, to join civil rights activists under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on a march to the state capital of Montgomery, to protest restrictions on African American voting rights. Selma not only represented the first mass movement of whites into the civil rights movement,

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but also served as a highly visible marker of the church’s engagement with the most pressing social problem of the day. Selma’s white marchers were disproportionately Catholic, and habited nuns attracted a great deal of media attention.23 Sister Mary Peter Traxler (or Margaret Ellen Traxler, as she was known after she reverted to her birth name in the late 1960s), found the Selma experience to be so powerful that she was compelled to redefine her life as a woman religious. In an article titled “After Selma, Sister, You Can’t Go Home Again,” Traxler urged Catholic sisters to step outside the classroom and convent and work for justice in the world.24 Many Catholic sisters did indeed leave the classroom. As scholar Michael Novak described in his 1966 report on “The New Nuns,” sisters could be found working in urban renewal programs, advocacy, addiction counseling, chaplaincy, and government posts. Within Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, for example, American sisters worked with Head Start, Job Corps, and VISTA.25 The themes of both Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium shape the vocational narrative of Nancy Sylvester, I.H.M., who entered religious life in 1966. Sylvester’s cohort was the first in the congregation not to receive a new name upon entrance and the last to be admitted wearing a habit. For Sylvester, these two changes represented the “radical” vision of the Second Vatican Council. “Part of the goal of Vatican II was to promote the understanding that we are all called to holiness,” she explains. “Many people, including me, came to religious life wanting to be perfect.” As she experienced religious life in the era of Vatican II, however, Sylvester expanded her vision to encompass more than simply a desire for her own spiritual perfection. After participating in one of NETWORK’s early legislative seminars, she began to work at the organization as a researcher and then a lobbyist. She eventually would serve as its executive director for ten years. “I was never political growing up,” she recalls. But entering religious life in 1966 nudged her “from piety to politics.”26 Campbell, future director of NETWORK, entered religious life the same year as Sylvester. As Sylvester does, Campbell cites a combination of council directives and American social change as formative experiences in her early religious life. Asked to explain “what makes the nuns

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on the bus roll,” for example, Campbell pointed to two vivid memories from the late 1960s. The first of these, confirming Traxler’s experience, involved listening to “Martin Luther King’s amazing speeches.” The ­second was seeing her former grade school teachers, the Immaculate Heart sisters in California, “getting thrown out of the Church by Car­ dinal McIntyre.”27 Campbell was referring to a dramatic confrontation in Los Angeles between Cardinal Francis McIntyre and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHMs). After a series of chapter meetings in which they discussed the implementation of Vatican II norms, the IHMs had revised their community rule to allow for secular dress, relaxation of strict schedules in convent life, and opportunities for apostolic work aside from the traditional occupations of teaching or nursing. While the sisters believed that they were following Pope Paul VI’s command to work seriously for renewal, McIntyre interpreted their actions quite differently. As a pontifical order, the IHMs were responsible to the Holy See’s Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (the Vatican dicastery overseeing religious orders) rather than McIntyre, but their motherhouse was located in Los Angeles, and most of them taught in diocesan schools. As a result, McIntyre’s disapproval of the IHMs— and their refusal to acquiesce to it—had severe consequences for the ­congregation. By the time the conflict ended, the majority of the IHMs had resigned their teaching positions, petitioned for a release from vows, and formed an independent, noncanonical lay community.28 Even when not as highly publicized as the confrontation in Los Angeles, clashes between specific congregations and their clerical superiors helped to nurture among sisters a growing feminist awareness that had begun to develop at the council itself. In October 1963, during the council’s second session, Suenens had asked the assembled bishops how they could reasonably deliberate the future of the church when half of it was missing: no women had been invited. In response, Pope Paul VI appointed fifteen female “auditors” to attend the council beginning with its third session in September 1964.29 One of them was an American sister named Mary Luke Tobin. Unlike Sylvester or Campbell, Tobin was well-­ established in religious life by Vatican II. She had entered the Sisters of Loretto in 1927 and was elected the congregation’s superior general in 1958. In 1963 she was serving as the head of the CMSW, and it was in

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that capacity that she received her invitation to attend the council’s third and fourth sessions. Tobin’s awakening as a feminist began at the council, with the realization that she and the other fourteen female auditors had neither a voice nor a vote in the proceedings. In recognition of the fact that they were given the same status as the council’s Protestant observers, one memoir written by women at the council is titled Guests in Their Own House.30 Present at the meetings of the commission charged with writing Gaudium et Spes, Tobin reports that there were gestures “to take a stand for women by recognizing the prevailing discrimination against them.” Tobin characterized Vatican II as “an opening, although just a tiny crack in the door, to a recognition of the vast indifference toward women and the ignoring of their potential within the whole body of the Church.”31 Tobin’s experiences in Rome prepared her to be sympathetic to the resurgence of feminism back in the United States, and the teachings of Vatican II combined with the example of U.S. feminists to inspire her, along with many other Catholic sisters, to challenge their status as “second-­class citizens” within the Church.32 Tobin’s feminist sensibilities would develop further as she spearheaded a reorganization of the CMSW in the light of council mandates. The pope, Tobin reported, wished “the religious woman [to] find today a more direct and fuller participation in the life of the Church,” and that the organization of leaders should reorganize itself to reflect “the expectation to exercise leadership in the broad arenas of church and world, not just inside their communities.”33 Between 1966 and 1998, CMSW conducted a “Sisters’ Survey” among all American women religious, an unprecedented maneuver that gave sisters, “for the first time in the history of religious life, a collective experience of being agents in a field much broader than a single community or diocese.” The Sisters’ Survey created a data pool on the institutional resources of congregations and national and community profiles of the beliefs and values of individual sisters, and it remains a rich and largely untapped resource for this era.34 After 1970 references to “women’s liberation” appeared regularly in CMSW memos, correspondence, and published documents. The term was evoked particularly dramatically in the keynote address at the 1970 national assembly. Referring to the fact that CMSW was subject to Vatican authority, the speaker, a Jesuit priest, encouraged sisters “to de-

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clare in no uncertain terms that legislation without representation is ­intolerable.” Otherwise, he argued, CMSW was still “light years away from 1776. The most forceful way of declaring liberation would be to dissolve this organization. Women’s Liberation means something very significant, and you would be well advised to join hands with this huge and significant movement around the world through such a gesture.”35 CMSW did not choose to dissolve itself, but its reorganization did culminate in the adoption of a new name: the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR).36 The word superior was the primary sticking point, as it emphasized hierarchy and unilateralism rather than inclusion and collaboration (“You can’t have a superior without an inferior,” one sister observed). It had already been eliminated within particular congregations, usually supplanted by president (today, governance within many congregations is vested in a leadership team rather than in an individual woman). The new title, which members believed reflected the insights and transformations of the reorganization process, incorporated women religious, the term that most contemporary sisters prefer, despite its inherent awkwardness and potential for confusion (“Since when did this adjective become a noun?” one exasperated doctoral student of mine recently exclaimed). Not all sisters were open to feminism, of course, and dissenters soon emerged within the group. Mother Claudia Honsberger, superior of a large women’s congregation in Philadelphia, was among those Catholic sisters who believed the new direction of U.S. religious life reflected a misinterpretation of the council’s teaching. Honsberger and others formed an organization to rival LCWR, Consortium Perfectae Caritatis, in 1971.37 Objections to the group’s burgeoning feminist orientation also surfaced among church authorities. When the leaders of LCWR submitted the new title to the Holy See’s Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes, the Vatican body that had to approve the change, church officials voiced strong objections to the inclusion of the word leadership. The Congregation eventually approved it three years later, on the condition the title be followed by a clarifying sentence: “This title is to be interpreted as: the Conference of Leaders of Congregations of Women Religious of the United States of America,” and not, in other words, leaders in any other arena.38 This dispute presaged future conflicts between

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feminist-­oriented sisters and the Holy See. Indeed, it is impossible to understand early twenty-first-century conflicts between the Vatican and American nuns—namely, the three-year investigation the Holy See’s Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes conducted on Ameri­ can sisters between 2009 and 2012 and the “doctrinal assessment” of LCWR announced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2012—without examining the roots of dissension planted in the early 1970s.39 If women religious were growing increasingly inclined to challenge church leaders in that decade, many also saw it as their duty to challenge the power of the state. At its 1970 assembly, the members of the CMSW insisted that “the spirituality of the religious must be contemporary and American” and being American meant helping the United States live up to its own ideals, using Catholic social teaching as a guide.40 This was the impetus for the founding vision of NETWORK, which was endorsed by the CMSW in 1971 by a wide margin. The two organizations had considerable overlap in membership, and for a time NETWORK was referred to as “the official lobbying arm” of the larger organization.41 The lines were blurred between the two organizations until they officially declared their separation. One critical distinction is that NETWORK is now organized into an independent 501(c)3, while LCWR remains ­subject to Vatican authority (hence the ability of the Congregation for Religious to conduct the 2012 doctrinal assessment).42 NETWORK’s first executive director, Carol Coston, had entered the Adrian Dominicans in 1955. During the first decade of her religious life she taught at the community’s schools in Detroit, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. She recalls the chapter meetings in the wake of the council as exhilarating in their attempt to determine how the vision of their thirteenth-century founder, Saint Dominic, translated into modern world. These were not easy conversations; she describes the meeting of 1968 as particularly “bloody.” Nevertheless it was this period of collective and individual discernment that prompted Coston to move from a convent into a newly built low-income housing project and to leave teaching to work in a Department of Labor–funded Neighborhood Youth Corps. In walking through these “new doorways,” Coston realized that her approach to social justice was overly focused on service at the

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expense of empowerment. As she would later put it, her attitude was “too much of ‘I’ll fix it up for you’ by badgering the welfare office or pulling strings through friendly contacts within the system, and not enough of analysis of why these economic discrepancies continue to exist.” This new consciousness is what prompted Coston to “tag along” with another sister to the 1971 meeting at Trinity College. She met other sisters there who, inspired by the energy of the council, had begun to get involved in local politics. Coston volunteered to serve on the steering committee and was hired as NETWORK’s first executive director the following spring.43 Under Coston’s leadership, NETWORK lobbied to eliminate funding for the Vietnam War, to reduce aid to countries violating human rights, to limit the defense budget, to increase funds for social service, to raise the federal minimum wage, to champion a national system of health care, and to support the Equal Rights Amendment. In addition to this direct work, NETWORK organized “legislative seminars” throughout the United States. The goal was to make sisters collectively more politically aware, and the topics focused on the American political system. Meanwhile, for Coston, as for Tobin and for many American Catholic sisters, the women’s liberation movement amplified the message of Vatican II. Through their exposure to the world of women “artists, poets, singers, novelists, theorists and historians,” Catholic sisters “began to develop a feminist perspective that recognized and critiqued domination wherever it operated—men over women, whites over blacks, U.S. over Third World countries, military over civilians, hierarchy over religious.”44 Coston’s reference to “Third World countries” points to a benefit of paying more attention to her and her contemporaries as subjects of historical study. As American historians increasingly adopt transnational perspectives, the members of the Catholic Church—an organization characterized by David A. Bell as the “the world’s most successful global institution”—can help U.S. historians look beyond national borders and develop global analyses.45 While it is true that, starting well before the period under consideration here, Catholic sisters can provide a gateway to transnational history, it is also the case that they began to think more consciously beyond U.S. borders in the era of the Second Vatican Council. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, both Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII pleaded with Catholic religious orders in the West to send more

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members to the Global South, and almost two thousand U.S. sisters responded to his call.46 Of the forty-seven women present at that meeting at Trinity College in December 1971, over half had, like Coston, served missions in the developing world. Coston recalled that “many of us who had worked in Third World countries brought a particularly different perspective to pre-chapter discussions and chapter decisions—more challenging, and more critical of U.S. foreign and domestic policy.”47 Tobin, too, had developed a global consciousness in the years surrounding the founding of NETWORK. One of her friends, a sister serving in Korea, wrote to Tobin in 1968 urging her to use her influence as an American religious leader to “bring Vatican II to the Korean sisterhoods.”48 In summer 1970 Tobin was invited to join an interdenominational fact-finding mission to Saigon. She described the trip as “a transition point between the rather circumscribed life and tasks” associated with the institutional church and “the more demanding, much wider vision of what it means to be a citizen of the world.”49 In subsequent summers Tobin visited Northern Ireland and El Salvador during times of turmoil. Tobin’s international outreach provides just one example of the increasingly global ministry of women religious. In 1970 CMSW reminded members that “we are all acutely aware that today we live in a ‘global village,’ and we must find and help others to find a way living in peace and justice together if we are going to continue to live at all.”50 At the LCWR Assembly in 1975, global needs outnumbered national concerns in the priorities set by the conference organizers. At the top of the list of “challenges that required concerted action” were world hunger and the energy crisis; needs of Southeast Asian refugees, especially Vietnamese sisters; and the role of religious in oppressive political and military associations.51 One telling statement in the Vatican’s 2012 doctrinal assessment of LCWR referenced American sisters’ considerable influence over religious congregations throughout the world, particularly with regard to feminism. Indeed, the international orientation of U.S. Catholic sisters may well provide historians with a bridge to a more global analysis of the long 1960s. The primary benefit of paying more scholarly attention to Catholic sisters during the era of Vatican II, however, is that their story provides a much-needed corrective to the assumption that faith and femi­nism have been antithetical to each other in U.S. history. Just as

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Campbell relies on prayer and meditation to marshal what might seem to be opposing forces into mutually generative ones, so, too, can historians utilize the tools of their trade to arrive at a fuller understanding of how American women combined faith and feminism in creative ways. With careful attention to primary sources, an openness to previously overlooked figures, and a readiness to challenge existing assumptions, scholars can craft narratives in which religious belief appears not only as a roadblock but often as a galvanizing force, and in which Campbell, Tobin, and other sister-activists appear not as anomalies but as emblems of an era of transformation.

Notes 1. Simone Campbell, “The dangers of becoming a ‘celebrity nun,’” America, September 19, 2017. 2. “Meet the Feminist Nun on a Social Justice Bus Tour of America,” Women in the World, September 24, 2015, https://womenintheworld.com/2015 /09/24/meet-the-feminist-nun-on-a-social-justice-bus-tour-of-america/. 3.  According to Ann Braude, a leading scholar of women and American religion, “the assumption of an inherent conflict between faith and feminism, an intellectual claim dating at least back to the French Revolution, has become erroneously embedded in narratives of U.S. history.” Braude, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Catherine Brekus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 234. 4.  Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Benjamin Wayman, “Ordaining Women and The Woman’s Bible: Reading the Bible with B. T. Roberts and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Women’s Studies 43, no. 5 ( July 2014): 541–66. 5.  Ann Braude, Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 6.  Leslie Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): 108. 7.  Suellen Hoy, “The Journey Out: Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Women Religious to the United States, 1812–1914,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4/7, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1995): 65. 8.  Sr. Agnes Loreto to Sr. Superior [Mary Borgia], September 15, 1897, Trinity College Archives. 9.  Quoted in Katharine O’Keeffe O’Mahoney, Famous Irishwomen (Lawrence, MA: Lawrence Publishing, 1907), 127.

218  Kathleen Sprows Cummings 10.  Sister Julia McGroarty to Sisters of Trinity, February 1901, “Founding Years,” Trinity College Archives, Washington, DC. 11.  For more on Trinity’s founding, see chapter 2 in Kathleen Sprows ­Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 12.  Quoted in Braude, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” 240. 13.  “Dear Sisters” letter, August 20, 1973, folder 6, box 24, Leadership Conference of Women Religious (hereafter cited as CLCW), University of Notre Dame Archives (hereafter UNDA). 14.  Kathleen Sprows Cummings, “Frances Cabrini, American Exceptionalism, and Returning to Rome,” Catholic Historical Review 104, no. 1 (2018): 1–22. 15.  Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M., Buying the Field: Catholic Religious Life in ­Mission to the World (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 599–600. 16.  While there is wide disagreement among Christian denominations over the validity of certain ecumenical councils, the Roman Catholic Church and churches in communion with it counted twenty at the time John convoked Vatican II. 17.  John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 12; Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Timothy M. Matovina, and Robert A. Orsi, Catholics in the Vatican II Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 18. McGuinness, Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 158–60. 19.  Suenens, Leon Joseph Cardinal, The Nun in the World: New Dimensions in the Modern Apostolate (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962). 20. Schneiders, Buying the Field, 599–600. 21.  Ibid., 603. 22.  Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, http:// www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii _cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 23. For other valuable perspectives on the intersection between social change and Vatican II mandates in the lives of American sisters, see Ann Patrick Ware, Midwives of the Future: American Sisters Tell Their Story, ed. Ann Patrick Ware (Kansas City, MO: Leaven Press, 1985), especially essays by Mary Luke Tobin, S.L.; Margaret Ellen Traxler; and Jeannine Grammick. 24.  Mary Peter Traxler, “After Selma, Sister, You Can’t Stay Home Again,” Extension 60 ( June 1965), 17–18. 25.  M. Charles Borromeo Muckenhirn, The New Nuns (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968), esp. chapter 1, Michael Novak, “The New Nuns”; Amy Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 57, 59, 60, 101, 109, 142, 199, 216.

Catholic Women Religious in an Age of Fracture  219 26.  “From Piety to Politics,” interview with Sister Nancy Sylvester, I.H.M., U.S. Catholic 79, no. 1 ( January 2014), 12–16; NETWORK (hereafter cited as CNET) 18/23, UNDA. 27.  Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, “Sister Simone Campbell: What Makes this Nun on the Bus Roll?” Huffington Post, May 3, 2013, https://www.huffpost .com/entry/sister-simone-campbell-nun-on-bus_b_3209167. 28.  For a firsthand account of the conflict, see Anita Caspary, Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), especially chapters 1, 9, and 11. 29.  Suenens argued that “Women too should be invited as auditors; unless I am mistaken, they make up half of the human race.” “The Charismatic Dimension of the Church” 34, emphasis original; John L. Allen Jr., “Remembering the Women of Vatican II,” National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 12, 2012, https://www .ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/remembering-women-vatican-ii. 30.  Carmen McEnroy, Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II (New York: Crossroad, 1996). 31.  Mary Luke Tobin, “Women and the Church Since Vatican II,” America 155, no. 12 (November 1, 1986): 244. 32.  Ibid., 243. 33.  Ibid., 244. 34.  “Memo for Congregation for Religious on Sisters’ Survey, June 1969,” CLCW folder 10, box 15, UNDA; for more information on how to utilize this resource, see https://cushwa.nd.edu/news/the-sisters-survey-preservation-and -access-for-a-new-generation/. 35.  John C. Haughey, S.J., “Where Has Our Search Led Us?” September 1970, CLCW folder 10, box 18, UNDA. 36.  “Proposed Name Changes to CMSW,” October 1970, box 10, folder 18, CLCW; press release, August 23, 1971, CLCW box 10, folder 22, UNDA. 37.  Now known as the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), this organization was granted canonical recognition in 1992. 38.  “Proposed Name Changes to CMSW”; press release, August 23, 1971; Lora Ann Quiñonez and Mary Daniel Turner, Transformation of American Catholic Sisters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 28. 39.  Kathleen Sprows Cummings, “The Vatican and American Catholic Sisters,” Religion in American History blog, July 16, 2009, http://usreligion.blogspot .com/2009/07/vatican-and-american-catholic-sisters.html. 40. “Proposed Agenda, CMSW-CMSM Liaison Committee Meeting,” ­August 25, 1970, CLCW box 6, folder 8, UNDA. 41.  Mary Daniel Turner to Sr. Joan Puls, September 11, 1974, CLCW box 6, folder 24, UNDA. 42.  CLCW box 6, folders 24–25, UNDA, covers the LCWR-NETWORK liaison.

220  Kathleen Sprows Cummings 43.  Carol Coston, “Open Windows, Open Doors,” in Midwives of the Future, ed. Ann Patrick Ware, 154. 44.  Coston, “Open Windows, Open Doors,” 147. 45.  David A. Bell, “This is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network,” The New Republic, October 25, 2013, https://newrepublic .com/article/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overuse-network -metaphor. 46.  Mary M. McGlone, C.S.J., Sharing Faith Across the Hemisphere (Washington, DC: NCCB Committee on the Church in Latin America, 1997), 104. 47.  Coston, “Open Windows, Open Doors.” 48.  Sr. Mary Augusta Hock to Sr. Mary Luke, February 17, 1968, CLCW box 7, folder 3, UNDA. 49.  Tobin, “Doors to the World,” in Midwives of the Future, ed. Ann Patrick Ware, 187. 50. Memo to members of CMSW, no date, CLCW box 10, folder 18, UNDA. 51.  Press release, August 28, 1975, CLCW box 12, folder 10, UNDA.

CHAPTER 10

The Occasional Catholics Faith, Family, and the “Spanish-Speaking” Voter B e n j a m i n F r a n c i s - Fa l l o n ★

“By and large, to be an American today means to be either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew.” So proclaimed Will Herberg, the former communist turned theologian, in 1955. Over the three decades preceding Herberg’s declaration, the passage of new immigration restrictions, a global economic catastrophe, and the traumatic disruptions of world war had sharply curtailed immigration to the United States. Old World allegiances were no longer being replenished at the same rate. The country, observed Herberg, was fast becoming a “triple melting pot” whose most meaningful social fault lines ran between faiths. Even in the political realm, he claimed, where “half-forgotten, half-buried ethnic allegiances and prejudices still play a sizable part,” party leaders were “beginning to think in terms of Catholic, Protestant, and Jew.”1 There were exceptions. In a footnote to this discussion, Herberg mentioned Black people and “the recent Latin-American immigrants (Mexicans in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in New York and other ­eastern centers),” acknowledging that their “primary context of self-­ identification and social location remains their ethnic or ‘racial’ group.” Herberg conceded that those “Latin Americans” he identified “remain 221

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almost entirely unassimilated in the Catholic community.” It was “yet too soon to judge” if leaders would succeed at “keeping” them, “particularly the Puerto Ricans, in the church and assimilating them into the general Catholic community.”2 Herberg’s caveat was highly necessary, for it points to the fluid and complex ethnoracial and religious positions the country’s “Latin Ameri­can” peoples occupied during the 1950s. The major immigration restrictions of the 1920s had targeted Southern and Eastern Europeans, people like Herberg’s Russian immigrant parents. Congress, bowing to agribusiness pressure, had left western hemisphere immigration com­ paratively open. In the Southwest and parts of the industrial Midwest, Mexican culture was regularly replenished. And by the 1950s and 1960s, Puerto Rican migrants and refugees fleeing Cuba’s revolution had thoroughly transplanted their traditions in New York City and Miami, respectively.3 While the decennial census counted these populations as separate subsets of the nation’s white population, their members regularly endured racism and discrimination of a sort that distinguished their lives from those of their Euro-American contemporaries. By the 1960s, that “Latin Americans” would simply assimilate into a wider American Catholic community was increasingly unlikely. The Black freedom struggle helped convince Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and some Cuban leaders to stake out a place in the broader transformation that one scholar calls the “Minority Rights Revolution.”4 While leaders of these national origin communities had not historically made many substantive connections, by the time of the Nixon presidency (1969–1974) a growing number were demanding that the federal government recognize them as one people. What distinguished this nationwide community varied, depending upon who was asked. Nevertheless, a ­net­work of activists, politicians, and lobbyists began announcing that “Spanish-­speaking Americans,” and later “Hispanics,” constituted ­America’s second-largest minority. Many of them proclaimed the group—­traditionally a Democratic constituency—to be now a “swing vote,” the key to future presidential elections. As new constituencies emerged, old ones reconfigured themselves. The “Spanish-speaking vote” gained prominence at roughly the same time as another electorate whose name, values, and precise character were

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also subject to some dispute. Sometimes called “Catholics,” other times referred to as the “Ethnic-Catholic”5 vote, they were also known as the “white ethnics.” Like the Spanish-speaking, they, too, were vocally rejecting the idea of the American melting pot. And, like the Spanish-­speaking, in the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, their historically Democratic political loyalties were believed to be very much up for grabs.6 This paper probes the relationship between these two constituencies, the Ethnic-Catholic and the Spanish-speaking, during their contemporaneous ascent in national politics. It identifies the ways in which the two groups overlapped in the Nixon administration’s electoral strategy and the factors that prevented their closer political coordination. In so doing, it suggests the ways in which the making of the Spanish-­speaking vote influenced the construction of the Catholic vote, and vice versa. Studies of the political uses to which Hispanic identity has been put reveal its essential malleability and capacity to forge as well as fracture alliances. Scholars who train their lenses on a single region or locality have tended to emphasize its divisiveness, particularly in matters of race relations. According to one such interpretation, “becoming Hispanic” was a form of racial assimilation in which Mexican Americans in the Southwest pursued a place on the dominant side of the color line. Their midcentury embrace of “whiteness” meant sacrificing the chance to join with African Americans to overthrow the racism that subordinated them both.7 Likewise, a study of New York City argues that the “Hispanicity” that Puerto Rican community leaders espoused during the late 1960s and 1970s was imagined as “mutually incompatible with ‘blackness.’” As Puerto Ricans secured municipal support for bilingualism by emphasizing their linguistic difference, their racial distancing helped rupture a once successful civil rights coalition that had existed between the group and African Americans.8 In contrast, national-level analyses generally emphasize unification above fragmentation. Although they differ on the extent to which the Hispanic project was imposed upon Latino communities, they highlight efforts to forge a consensus about the characteristics bonding the country’s distinct populations of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. Race mattered, but so did notions of Latino religiosity—often entwined with ideas about family values—in the molding of these diverse populations into one people in the workings of the state and the media.9

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Nevertheless, one seldom sees this deployment of religion—Latino Catholicism specifically—examined in light of other contemporary bids to politicize faith. It is similarly rare for examinations of Republicans’ outreach to Catholics to factor in the GOP’s role in fostering the growth of a Latino constituency. Rather, scholarship has tended to replicate the electoral silos of the campaign season, with Catholics as white denizens of the urban, industrial North and Spanish-speaking Americans as a ­national minority most prevalent in the Southwest. This perspective ­emphasizes Republicans’ strategizing on abortion and aid to parochial schools as being at the core of Catholic outreach.10 Another study argues that the GOP developed its “White Ethnic Strategy” with the aim of stoking hostility to liberal civil rights measures such as busing, whipping up support for law-and-order politics, all while doing little to ameliorate the economic plight of the ethnics and those (African Americans, especially) against whom Republicans pitted them.11 While the Nixon administration was obsessed with comprehending the electorate’s segmentation—and often encouraged it—the many intersections in its voter liaison strategies point to the value in probing for common themes. Set alongside Nixon’s outreach to Spanish-­speaking Americans, its “Catholic strategy” takes on a less conservative cast. Indeed, the rise of the heavily Catholic Spanish-speaking vote presented Republicans with a multifaceted dilemma, blurring categories and offering few direct routes to either electoral unification or polarization. Republicans believed the Spanish-speaking possessed conservative cultural values derived from Catholicism. This in turn suggested the possibility of linking them politically with other Catholic constituencies the White House pursued. In the minds of administration Catholic strategists, however, it was white Northeastern and Midwestern workingmen and their families who constituted the true Catholic vote. Moreover, when Republicans recognized Latino piety, they often did so to justify aiding the group with affirmative action and business development programs for minorities that were rarely extended to the Ethnic-Catholic voter. These distinctions in treatment not only worked against the creation of a n ­ ationwide Catholic bloc; they further disorganized Democratic minorities. Casting the Spanish-speaking as a long-suffering, faithful, family-­oriented, and deserving minority, White House strategists dis-

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tributed federal grants, jobs, and contracts to the Spanish-speaking in ways calculated to intensify that group’s rivalry with African Americans. But the fracturing went deeper still. While Republicans (and many Democrats) asserted that a culture of faith and obedience unified the Spanish-speaking and set them apart from other minorities (read African Americans), they segmented that Latino electorate into desirable and undesirable national origin groups. In this, Republicans’ ideas about Spanish-­speaking Americans’ differing class, religious, and racial positions all came into play. What remained was a Republican Catholic appeal carefully divided between middle-class Mexican Americans in the Southwest and working-class white ethnics in the Northeast and industrial Midwest.

Recognizing a “Spanish-Speaking” Constituency In the late 1960s, the New Deal coalition was crumbling. With traditional Democratic loyalties shaken by revolutions in race and sexual mores, by the vocal and sometimes violent protests against war and social injustice, and by widening economic insecurity, political realignment seemed in the air. As a presidential candidate in 1968, Richard Nixon spoke to a ­“silent center” composed of the “the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.” These people loved their country, had made it prosperous through hard work, and had fought to defend it in times of war. Accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency, Richard Nixon had called these people the “forgotten Americans.”12 They were fundamental ingredients of the “New Majority” that he dreamed of creating. While Nixon would claim the New Majority was “not a grouping of power blocs, but an alliance of ideas,” his new administration devoted itself to converting voters in large groups.13 Nixon told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman in January 1970 that the need was to build “our own new coalition based on [the] Silent Majority [of supporters of Nixon’s Vietnam policy], blue collar, Catholic, Poles, Italians, and Irish.”14 Although blue collar and Catholic (and “ethnic”) were not perfectly interchangeable categories, they did substantially overlap. In Slovak American

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t­ heologian and activist Michael Novak’s memorable phrasing, they were the “PIGS” (Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs). “Neither WASP nor Jew nor Black,” as Novak put it, they had come to feel ignored by politicians who had, they felt, caved in to the demands of the noisier minorities, ­particularly African Americans.15 Their public persona was as Catholic, working class, family oriented, patriotic, and anti-communist. They were strong supporters of the American military. As most observers saw it, this constituency was physically rooted in the cities of the Northeast and the industrial Midwest. These “ethnics” were not, however, the lone predominantly Catholic constituency that the Nixon White House desired. In their faith, lifestyles, and attitudes, they bore a strong resemblance to another piece of the teetering Democratic coalition the administration would seek to enlist in the New Majority, the group becoming known officially as “Spanish-speaking Americans.” Any White House attempt to fashion a single Catholic political appeal, one that integrated the budding Spanish-speaking vote, faced significant institutional impediments. First, unlike the “unmeltable ethnics” of whom Novak wrote, the “Spanish-speaking” or “Spanish surname” population (no one bureaucratic identifier had yet taken hold) had by the late 1960s achieved official recognition as a minority group. Indeed, bureaucratic acknowledgment that they were different from white or Black America had been granted in the middle 1950s, when “Spanish-­ Americans” and Puerto Ricans had been included on forms designed to measure the progress of affirmative action in federal contracting.16 These same federal forms excluded the Irish, Italians, and Poles and gave no space to Catholics as such.17 As affirmative action expanded its reach and rewards, white ethnics increasingly and vocally argued that their background, including their Catholicism (and in some cases their Judaism), had long been used against them by WASP Americans. Their protests rarely led to policies that compensated them for discrimination suffered in the past or present. Further delineation between the groups came during the 1960s. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson created an Inter-­ Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs (ICMAA) with the stated aim of securing for Mexican Americans a greater voice in civil rights efforts and the War on Poverty.18 Ending the group’s marginalization from national economic life was the committee’s main goal. Religion

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was scarcely considered relevant to the discussion. In 1969 Congress debated making the ICMAA into a truly pan-Hispanic lobby, funding a large staff and an advisory committee composed of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. The new entity would be called the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking People (CCOSSP). Statutory recognition of a single national Spanish-speaking minority was loaded with challenges, however. Most Mexican Americans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans lived in different regions of the country. Their leaders had few real relationships. In the Southwest alone, ethnic Mexicans often sharply disagreed over whether and how to be identified ethnically. In addition, grassroots activists in these communities were espousing militant forms of nationalism that defied the logic of pan-Hispanic unity. Congress, though, wished for a solution that would allow these many populations to interact with the federal government simply and efficiently. Thus legislators sought to define the common traits that would bind these peoples together as one constituency. They considered the Spanish language a start, though majorities of Spanish-speaking Americans at the time spoke English. Religion served their purposes as well. Politicians seeking to justify the bureaucratic fusion of all Spanish-speaking Americans chose to ignore that in these communities existed a growing yearning to challenge authority, for school walkouts, antiwar marches, and the occasional occupation of federal lands. Perhaps fearing blowback from Spanish-­speaking people who regarded themselves as white, the congressmen also were quiet on any “racial” barriers this group faced. Instead, they invoked a vague culture of faith and family that the nation’s Latino populations all supposedly shared, a religious outlook that set the group apart from the tumult of late 1960s America. They were “gentle and kindly . . . a religious-­type people,” claimed the Los Angeles Democratic representative Chet Holifield. Thomas Railsback, an Illinois Republican, likewise heaped praise upon this “gentle, kind, timid, and deeply religious people.” They weren’t out to “demonstrate in the streets, burn down buildings, and break windows.” They were self-sufficient, proud, and family oriented.19 The Nixon administration approved. Faith was a powerful tool for the White House in reasserting authority amid the period’s social

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­ pheavals, and a key means of coordinating the New Majority. To reach u evangelical America, and especially the white South, Nixon leaned heavily on his relationship with the Reverend Billy Graham.20 And though Black voters continued their long retreat from Republicanism, Nixon allies such as pastor as E. V. Hill served as spiritual conduits to the group and symbols of the GOP’s racial inclusiveness. However small, Black turnout for Nixon might make all the difference, especially in the South, Republican strategists reasoned.21 While Spanish-speaking Americans occupied few prime positions in the Catholic hierarchy, their image as faithful and humble building blocks of a noble and just America resonated with a White House intent on rewarding those groups it deemed deserving. In December 1969, Richard Nixon signed the CCOSSP into law and, taking a page from the congressmen, hailed as many as ten million of “our people [who] draw upon a Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban heritage,” for showing “admirable respect for law, strong family and religious ties, and a proud individualism.”22 With faith and family on their side, and their individual initiative unencumbered, this was a valuable ethnic “minority” indeed.

Between “Ethnics,” “Catholics,” and “Minorities” While politicians of both parties showered praise on these industrious, humble, and patriotic Americans, Republicans in power struggled to find a coherent appeal to a group that was at once “ethnic,” largely Catholic, and, as far as most were concerned, minority. The “ethnic” outreach arm of the Republican National Committee (RNC), for example, kept the Spanish-speaking at arm’s length. Under the directorship of a Hungarian émigré named Laszlo Pasztor, the RNC’s “nationalities” unit functioned primarily to recruit Americans of Eastern European ancestry into the party, giving them a means of translating their anti-communism into Republicanism.23 The White House wanted Pasztor to refocus his energies on converting “key ethnic groups—Italians, Poles and Mexicans.”24 Although Pasztor accepted Cubans into the fold—they were well-known for their motivation to retake their homeland from Castro—he saw little room in “ethnic” affairs for groups that were, in his estimation, already

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receiving their fair share of the spotlight. “We need to show them [ethnics] the kind of ‘attention,’” he argued, “that will offset the constant publicity that blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and other minority poor are bombarded with.”25 Analysts to whom Republicans turned for political wisdom exhibited no consensus as to the proper way to understand the relationship among Spanish-speaking Americans, ethnics, and Catholics. Kevin Phillips’s 1969 manifesto, The Emerging Republican Majority, offered one perspective, rhapsodizing about the GOP’s chances to gain from the “immense middle-class impetus of Sun Belt and suburbia.”26 The Bronx-raised Phillips divided the country into various regions for analysis, which led him to perceive geographic fissures in the Spanish-speaking electorate. He also saw it existing in opposition to Catholic interests. In “the Northeast,” he observed, Black and Puerto Rican Democrats, aligned with white liberals, were “weakening the control of Catholic machines and generating sociopolitical demands unpopular among Catholic Democrats.”27 The faith of the Puerto Ricans in general, not to mention those who had been incorporated in those same Catholic machines, went unstated. There appeared little more reason to court the Spanish-speaking in “the Pacific States,” especially the “national sociopolitical microcosm” of California. In this case Mexican Americans were said to have teamed up with Black voters in a force opposed to Republicanism. Fortunately for the GOP, though, such “minority group support” was hardly “a mandatory ingredient of Republican victory in a big-city state.”28 Turning to “the South,” Phillips located multiple Latino populations in a “Latin Crescent,” plural of religion and liberal in politics. Stretching from El Paso to Miami, the zone encompassed the “Mexican” vote of Texas (“beginning to come into its own”), as well as the “Cuban cigar workers of Tampa” and “Latin refugees and fortune-hunters of southern Florida.” Though their uncompromising anti-communism and celebration of ­private enterprise would in time make them outspoken Reaganites, most of the Cubans, judged Phillips in 1969, were not “right-wing conservatives.” The Latin Crescent included as well the Catholic populations of “the French Creoles and Cajuns,” Portuguese, and Greeks, in addition to Northeastern Jews who had migrated to Florida.29 The region, as Phillips understood it, was not Republican material.

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Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg’s The Real Majority (1970) foretold a different political trajectory for the Spanish-speaking and the country. In Scammon and Wattenberg’s view, electoral geography was less useful than understanding “a set of public attitudes concerning the more personally frightening aspects of disruptive social change.” The party that carried the 1970s, they argued, would be the one that mastered an approach to the complex blend of crime, violence, the culture of protest, and the flouting of sexual norms that characterized late-1960s America. What mattered was the “Social Issue.”30 For Nixon, the arguments laid out in the book vindicated his appeal to the Silent Majority. They also suggested that the nation’s Latin Americans and “ethnics” and Catholics had more in common than Phillips had supposed. Both could be won over with an appeal to the Social Issue. Whereas Phillips had consigned Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans to regional pockets of liberalism, Scammon and Wattenberg recognized Latin Americans as both nationwide and comparable to other Catholic electoral segments. “Catholics in America,” they wrote, “are substantially more likely than Protestants to be first- and second-­ generation Americans (Italians, Poles, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans),” to be urban, and to be Democrats. Placing “Latin-Americans” under the heading of “Ethnic Groups,” the authors compared their voting history (in the East, South, and West) to both Slavic and Italian electoral patterns. While Latin Americans had been a “‘solid’ Democratic-liberal” vote in 1968, liberal Democrats could not take for granted their continued support. Mexican Americans in Southern California, for example, exhibited “the same susceptibility to a Social Issue campaign” as other Americans. Like other “ethnics,” they lived in cities, in close proximity to crime, and hated to see the protests of “black or white militants” shutter their children’s schools. In 1969 they had turned out in droves to help reelect Los Angeles’s conservative mayor Sam Yorty. His opponent, the former policeman and city councilman Tom Bradley, had received only lukewarm Mexican American support. Bradley was African American, and the authors claimed the results “cast at least some doubt on the prevailing notion that either the ‘poor’ or ‘minority groups’ are particularly monolithic or ‘coalescable.’”31 As it evolved, the White House’s Spanish-speaking strategy reflected the arguments of both Phillips and Scammon and Wattenberg. The

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a­ dministration was deeply mindful of the geography of the Spanish-­ speaking vote and of the need to appeal to it without jeopardizing Catholic support. Therefore, the White House consistently isolated the Puerto Ricans, who tended to live in closest proximity to the white ethnics, from its core Spanish-speaking outreach effort. During the 1968 campaign, Nixon had promised to hold a White House conference on the Mexican Americans. When pressure mounted for the administration to include Puerto Ricans, Republican congressmen from the Southwest, convinced that the Puerto Ricans were unalterably liberal and Democratic, prevailed upon the administration to deny them a place in such an event.32 Puerto Rican leaders protested, but the White House was unmoved. The Southwest was “where the votes are,” explained Ken Cole, aide to top domestic policy man John Ehrlichman.33 The social issue and geographic strategies reinforced each other. Surveys conducted in the summer of 1970, for instance, suggested that three-quarters of Mexican Americans in California “view[ed] themselves as members of the Silent Majority,” encouraging Republicans down this road.34 If the Social Issue motivated the Spanish-speaking as it did other Catholic voters, Republicans also encouraged the former’s political conversion with policies that targeted them as a minority. Nixon’s initial overtures to African Americans, the best known of which was his “Black Capitalism” program, had caught the eye of the president’s Mexican American appointees, such as CCOSSP chairman Martin Castillo. As distilled by other White House advisers, Castillo’s top priority after a frustrating first year was the following: “Presidential awareness that ­Negroes are not the only minority in the country.”35 Nixon’s top Mexican American appointee, Castillo reprised the image of the long-suffering Spanish-speaking American, implicitly denigrating African Americans in the process, when he justified his request for more federal jobs and programs for the Spanish-speaking, telling reporters, “attention should be given in terms of needs and numbers, and not in terms of those who would put the gun to our collective heads.”36 In the summer of 1970 he met with Vice President Spiro Agnew to plan ways of extending affir­ mative action to the group’s members seeking employment in the federal bureaucracy. While this policy was not announced until after the 1970 elections, Agnew was on hand to inaugurate a federally sponsored ­business development agency for Spanish-speaking Americans. On the

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occasion, the vice president declared it was high time the “relatively unpublicized minorities” and “forgotten minorities” got some attention.37 The Nixon administration would right past wrongs and devote resources to deserving groups. The implications for “Black-brown” relations would work themselves out.

A Minority “Under God” in 1972 Although the Spanish-speaking (Mexican Americans, especially) had a special role to play in Nixon’s politics of racial polarization, administration race baiting proved to be an ineffective strategy. The 1970 elections were a bust for Republicans. High-profile Republican candidates who courted Mexican American voters, such as George H. W. Bush in Texas, went down in defeat. The failures infuriated the president, whose own reelection would be decided in two years. Per his mandate, the Bureau of the Census had expanded its coverage of the Spanish-speaking from coast to coast, and the early reports suggested that the constituency could be central to victory in 1972. Nixon ordered an overhaul of the administration’s Spanish-speaking program, firing or reassigning staff and seeking fresh ideas for how to reach this group. Faith again resurfaced. Cutting against Republicans’ tendency to ­divide the Spanish-speaking electorate into worthy and unworthy national origin units, the administration’s analyses suggested that the entire Spanish-­speaking population’s shared spiritual values and closely related familial inclinations made them Nixon material, provided certain steps were taken. Henry M. Ramirez, a Mexican American and devout Catholic then employed at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, was brought in to offer his views. While his first recommendations for achieving “official recognition of the Spanish speaking” concerned their “identification . . . as a distinct minority group,” his second called for “recognition of Spanish speaking religious leaders.” As he explained to the administration, “regardless of origin, Spanish speaking Americans are generally characterized by a strong family structure, deep religious ties, a rather con­ servative political outlook and an ethnic pride which often takes the appearance of resistance to linguistic and cultural assimilation.”

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A Republican from Nixon’s hometown of Whittier, California, Ramirez urged the White House to adopt a more explicit focus on “the allegiance of the Spanish speaking to this country ‘under God.’” He explained that the group “by and large identifies with the Church; their basic conservatism and moral values are essentially Catholic.” Two Spanish-­speaking clerics, Patricio Flores and Juan Arzube, had recently been elevated to the rank of bishop in Brownsville, Texas, and Los Angeles, respectively. The president would be very wise to recognize their leadership.38 Reckoning much the same was a separate analysis overseen by ­Nixon’s adviser Robert Finch, former lieutenant governor of California and secretary of health, education, and welfare. According to its report, whether “Chicano,” Puerto Rican, or Cuban, the group shared “the same religion with variants, and the same respect for a strong nuclear family structure.” It appeared that these characteristics “indicate[d] that voting comes under the influence of family and church suasion.” Racial ani­ mosities complemented religion, suggested the analysis. The Democratic Party’s appearance as the “champion of the Blacks” created a golden opportunity for Republicans to gain the support of this group “beginning to call themselves ‘the second largest minority.’”39 In the fall of 1971, White House staff presented President Nixon with their overall assessment. Again, their confidential memorandum ­argued that the core cultural and religious values of Spanish-speaking Americans served to make them ripe for a potential switch in 1972. It was the group’s “innately conservative social outlook,” the analysts claimed, coupled with its long-standing political exclusion, that made its members “much more open to penetration by the President than their 80 to 90 percent Democratic registration would indicate.” A deeper look, however, reveals that not all Spanish-speaking Americans were equally susceptible to a godly Republican appeal. According to the researchers, it was the Mexican American population that was “particularly characterized by a very strong family structure, deep religious ties, respect for law and order and authority figures, and a generally conservative political outlook on other than ‘bread and butter’ issues.” As far as the staff could tell, the Catholic Church was “the single most influential body in Mexican-­­American communities.” Acknowledging a “growing trend” for

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clergy to play a more visible role in “in the civic, as well as the spiritual, affairs of Mexican-Americans,” they held that “active and persistent cultivation of church leaders, together with concrete attention to the needs of Mexican-Americans, can have an important political pay-off in the church’s assistance and indirect support.”40 The same strategists who spoke optimistically about reaching Mexican American conservatives through their church leaders made no mention of Puerto Ricans’ spiritual inclinations. It appears they believed the group was far less reachable through religious institutions, Catholic or otherwise. Instead, they pointed to Puerto Ricans’ long-standing ties to the Partido Popular Democrático, the Democratic Party analog that had governed the island for most of the postwar period. If Republican campaigners thought the president had any interest in Puerto Ricans before, however, they would not have after reading his response, scribbled in their memo’s margins: “We shouldn’t waste our time.”41 Cuban Americans, in contrast, were recognized more for their upward mobility than their religiosity or party ties. While they were accelerating their push to naturalize and register to vote, their electorate was still comparatively small as of 1972. They resented any subordination to the numerically larger Mexican American population. In addition to forming separate “Cuban American Clubs for Nixon,” they found it preferable to raise funds and participate in party activities through the National Republican Heritage Groups Council, as the GOP’s anti-communist ethnic unit was called by 1971.42 Class differences, national origin rivalries, and varied relationships to external governments thus undermined religion’s potential to define Republicans’ appeal to the Spanish-speaking electorate.43 Compounding this challenge was the difficulty convincing the administration’s lead theorists of the Catholic voter to imagine a more racially and regionally heterogeneous constituency. As the administration rolled out its revamped Spanish-speaking program in late 1971, Catholic adviser Patrick Buchanan offered this opinion: “Our political types, working the Chicano precincts and the Ghettoes, and Navaho reservations for Republican converts would do well to focus their attention upon the Holy Name Society, the Women’s Sodality and the Polish-­ American union.”44 For Buchanan, Catholic votes and those of the “fashionable minorities” had little in common, certainly not an equal place in the New Majority.45

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As the 1972 campaign gathered steam, the White House’s selective deployment of Catholicism combined with its desire to take full advantage of existing minority resources to further segregate its Spanish-­ speaking and Ethnic-Catholic appeals. The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) assembled a team of Mexican American operatives, including Ramirez, who had been promoted to the position of cabinet committee chairman. Focusing their efforts on the Southwest, this self-­ identified “Brown Mafia” sought out “the local community leaders, professionals and upwardly mobile lower-class Mexican-Americans,” the type of people the White House believed to respond to “dollars, programs and jobs.” Federal grants and positions were awarded and political points scored from the public appearances of the administration’s high-­ ranking Spanish-speaking appointees. The Brown Mafia sought to strengthen the existing Spanish-speaking economic development agency so it could serve as a sort of “Chicano Urban League.” They also trumpeted the Sixteen-Point Program, the affirmative action directive Nixon issued for Spanish-speaking Americans in the federal government after the 1970 elections. Through its workings, aspiring professionals could credit the administration with opening the doors of opportunity and claim to be working on their people’s behalf from their newfound positions of influence.46 Finally, as campaign strategists made clear, all this was to be done with the intention of “exploit[ing] Spanish-speaking ­hostility to blacks by reminding Spanish groups of the Democrats’ com­ mitment to blacks at their expense.”47 While Republicans emphasized the minority dimensions of Spanish-­ speaking politics, nurturing the group’s class aspirations and racial grievances, they did attempt to incorporate Catholic issues into their broader Spanish-speaking recruitment effort. Bilingual education was an important goal of many Spanish-speaking people, and by late 1971 the White House had ruled out requesting any additional funding for the program in the election year. However, campaign guru Chuck Colson believed that Nixon’s efforts to support Catholic education, which involved a plan to give tax credits for parents who sent their children to private schools, would provide a payoff. The “parochial school project,” he argued, “will help Spanish-speaking students because bilingual education is normally a component of those schools.”48

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Furthermore, though their main charge was dispensing material rewards to allies and publicizing the administration’s accomplishments, the Brown Mafia was also highly mindful of ways in which Catholicism might influence the campaign. Their main point of reference was the 1960 presidential elections, in which the Roman Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy had mobilized Mexican American voters and defeated Nixon by a historically narrow margin.49 The campaigners feared that Mexican Americans’ Catholicism could be once more used against the man who was now the sitting president. For example, when pondering Los Angeles Chicanos’ attitudes toward the field of Democratic presidential contenders, Spanish-speaking campaign director Alex Armen­ dariz remarked that, “a [Edward] Kennedy candidacy here would mean disaster.” Kennedy’s deceased brother Bobby was “still idolized” and, ­A rmendariz noted, “there is probably a religious identification,” even though most of the poll’s respondents claimed to believe “that religion should not affect politics.” At the same time, because they regarded Mexican Americans’ affections for Kennedy as the product of identification with the man and his family, aided by a shared faith but not an attachment to liberalism per se, not all was lost. Should Nixon’s opponent be someone other than Kennedy, the group’s Catholicism could then be activated to highlight social issues. As Armendariz stressed, “The abortion issue could be used against [George] McGovern by publishing his remarks on the subject face to face with those of Catholic Bishops (preferably Flores) who have remained solidly against abortion.”50 Put simply, Mexican Americans’ Catholicism cut no single way in 1972. After it became clear that the Democratic nomination would go to George McGovern, a liberal Protestant and U.S. senator from North Dakota, Armendariz pursued additional linkages with the CREEP’s wider Catholic strategy. Having read that Nixon intended to challenge McGovern’s position on several matters deemed important to Catholics, he quickly wrote to his superiors. The president’s plans to aid parochial schools, oppose unrestricted access to abortion, and fight obscenity and marijuana decriminalization had not only received “heavy backing from senior Catholic clerics in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia” but would also play well in the Southwest, Armendariz was certain. “If we could talk to someone who knows the general strategy,” he wrote, “we

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could pick up and use the same ideas in Los Angeles and San Antonio with the Spanish speaking clergy.” His superiors instructed him to contact Buchanan, but it is unclear if the connection was ever established.51 As the president’s most visible Spanish-speaking appointee, cabinet committee chairman Ramirez also tried to infuse the campaign with a faithful understanding of his people’s political identity. Ramirez prepared a speech for delivery to the platform committee at the Republican National Convention in Miami, in which he meant to debunk the “mistaken ideas” that he claimed had “kept America from seeing its Spanish-­ speaking people.” His first point to the GOP’s elite reads like a rejoinder to Buchanan and all those who believed his people were just another “fashionable” minority group looking for a “handout”: “They believe in God and in the family. They know religion and family are strong weapons against drugs and crime.” The speech went on to invoke the group’s patriotism, self-help traditions, and commitment to law and order. But also telling was the first commitment that Ramirez requested of his party. A tireless advocate of affirmative action, he called upon Republicans to endorse “parity in employment” for his people in both the federal government and at its contractors.52 While Ramirez saw no conflict between being a spiritual people and being a minority intent on achieving its fair share of the jobs at the country’s largest employer, the GOP of 1972 chose to accentuate the latter dimension of his group’s identity. The ­party’s platform refers to Republican support for bilingual education, ­affirmative action, and minority economic development programs for Spanish-speaking Americans, as well as the many “high federal positions” to which Nixon appointed them, but it leaves their faith unaddressed.53

Conclusion After the votes were counted and Nixon had completed his forty-ninestate landslide, the analysis mirrored the electioneering. “Mr. Nixon became the first Republican to win a majority of Roman Catholic votes,” the New York Times reported. Down the paragraph, the article separately cited Nixon’s erosion of “traditional Democratic strength in union households and Jewish, Spanish-surname and even black communities.”54

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Several commentators separately heralded the emergence of a Spanish-­ speaking vote. The Washington Post reported that “Latin voters, which means Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida and Mexican-­ Americans in Texas and California” gave Nixon 24 percent of their vote, up 7 percent from 1968.55 A few days later, CBS analysts credited Nixon with winning 31 percent of the nation’s overall “Spanish-speaking vote” and 49 percent of that constituency in Texas and Florida, states included in Phillips’s supposedly liberal “Latin Crescent.” Puerto Ricans, so maligned by the administration, still gave Nixon 24 percent of their votes, according to CBS.56 Most observers accepted that the Spanish-speaking vote was gaining importance, though few if any commentators attributed to it a role in Nixon’s historic breakthrough among Catholics. In the making of the Spanish-speaking vote, politicians deployed religion in no clear or consistent way. They used it sometimes as a pal­liative for a troubled America looking to escape the Black–white binary and sometimes to distinguish between worthy and unworthy Latinos. The group’s respect for the clergy, strong family ties, and supposedly con­ servative outlook all seemed to recommend viewing Spanish-speaking Americans as one people defined by putatively Catholic values, and that may have portended an alliance with other Catholics. Policy, however, recognized them primarily as a minority. In the last analysis, choices made at the pinnacle of national politics to polarize white and minority, Spanish-speaking and Black, Mexican American and Puerto Rican, not only diminished the Spanish-speaking vote, but also prevented the White House—and most Americans—from envisioning Catholics as a truly nationwide, multiethnic, and multiracial political constituency in the 1970s. In the following decades, the Latino political project continued to be very much a work in progress. Even as its leaders grew increasingly sophisticated, pan-Hispanic politics become more complicated by the political maturation or arrival of Cubans, Dominicans, Peruvians, and Salvadorans, to name just a few emerging constituencies. The growth of Protestantism in Latin America and among American Latinos further diversified the group that officially became the country’s largest minority in 2003. The difficulty of defining such a vast and diverse constituency left ample space for Latino Pentecostals’ formulations of a “new liberation theology” to extend the terrain on which politicians contest Latino religiosity and with it the place of Latinos in the United States. Although

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most Republicans have retreated from support for affirmative action and bilingual education, the Pentecostal visions for civic engagement that Kate Bowler so shrewdly illuminates have presented the GOP with new opportunities to coalesce Latino support, even around economic issues of which Democrats had long claimed ownership. They also suggest a mechanism by which Republicans might compete for the support of all Latino populations, rather than reward individuals and organizations based upon their ability to represent particular Latino national origin subgroups. Yet Latino Pentecostals still operate in a world in which nationality and region play central roles in defining of Latino politics and identity. The reworking of “liberation” likewise takes place against a well-­ developed backdrop of pan-Hispanic institutions in politics, advocacy, and the media. And, finally, there remains the strong incentive for presidential aspirants and incumbents who seek to win majorities in states to play factions of Latinos off of each other, reinforcing old distinctions or helping to bring about new ones. If the processes evident in Nixon’s day are any guide, one strongly suspects that the road forward will be marked by at least as much fragmentation as coalescence.

Notes 1.  Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 53, 50, 48; my deep appreciation goes to Ed Countryman and Darren Dochuk for their perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For further exploration of the ideas laid out in this essay, see Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), especially chapters 5 and 7. 2. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 56n11, 173. 3.  As U.S. citizens from birth, Puerto Ricans were free to move to the mainland, essentially without restriction. 4.  John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5.  Committee for the Re-Election of the President, “Memorandum for the Attorney General,” December 16, 1971, in Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Watergate and Related Activities, Phase III: Campaign Financing, Book 13, 93rd Congress, 1st session, 5533.

240  Benjamin Francis-Fallon 6.  See Michael Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in American Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), 63. 7.  Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” in Reflexiones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 8.  Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 214 and chapter 6. 9.  For an argument that the Hispanic “label” was imposed from above, see Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). For a more recent take on the process that emphasizes the collaboration of a different set of Latino actors, see G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). On the role of advertisers in creating Latinidad, see Arlene M. Dávila, Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On the creation of the Hispanic political constituency and its role in the construction of Latinidad at the national level, see Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote. 10.  Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 153–55. 11.  Thomas J. Sugrue and John D. Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 175. 12.  Quoted in Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, 27–29. 13.  Quoted in ibid., 27–28. 14.  Quoted in Sugrue and Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” 186. 15. Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics, 63. 16. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution, 101, 102. 17.  Furthermore, workplace censuses were taken through “visual identification.” Because religion could not be determined via this method, and because officials perceived it a potentially serious constitutional violation (and against several state laws) to ask about it, white ethnics remained unincorporated in the changes. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution, 101, 109, 289. 18.  Puerto Ricans were ostensibly covered under the ICMAA, though as its name suggests, Mexican Americans were the committee’s overwhelming priority. 19.  Congressional Record, 91st Congress, 1st session, 1969, 115: 39398, 39400, 20.  See Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 21.  Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2011), 334–35.

The Occasional Catholics  241 22. Richard Nixon, “Statement on Signing the Bill Establishing the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking People,” December 31, 1969, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb .edu/documents/statement-signing-the-bill-establishing-the-cabinet-committee -opportunities-for-spanish. 23.  Ieva Zake, “Nixon vs. the G.O.P.: Republican Ethnic Politics, 1968– 1972,” Polish American Studies 67, no. 2 (Autumn 2010): 55. 24.  H. R. Haldeman to Harry S. Dent, October 31, 1969, in Civil Rights during the Nixon Administration, 1969–1973, ed. Hugh Davis Graham (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1989), part 1, reel 2. 25.  Quoted in Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution, 300. 26.  Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970), 474. 27.  Phillips also noted a “Puerto Rican backlash against Negroes” occurring in 1968, and that in New York they supported Nixon sometimes five times more than Black voters (still only 20–25 percent) and called the two groups “increasingly uneasy allies.” Ibid., 74, 110. 28.  Ibid., 446. 29.  Ibid., 282, 284. 30.  Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg, The Real Majority (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971), 43. 31.  Ibid., 64, 66, 237, 236. 32. Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, 83, 86; Gordon Brownell, Bill Casselman, Steve Hess to John Ehrlichman, October 1, 1969, box 21, Robert H. Finch Files, Staff Member and Office Files, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, College Park, MD (hereafter SMOF and NPM). 33.  Memorandum, Leonard Garment to Kenneth R. Cole Jr., September 8, 1970, box 16, Robert H. Finch Files, SMOF, NPM. 34.  “Mexican American Analysis of Survey Taken in California,” in Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972: Executive Session Hearings on Watergate and Related Activities, Use of Incumbency—Responsiveness Program, Book 19, 93rd Congress, 1st session, 8 ­ 681-2. 35.  The quote comes from an undated memorandum attached to another sent from Leonard Garment to John Ehrlichman on April 20, 1970, “Memorandum for the President,” box 15, Robert H. Finch Files, SMOF, NPM. 36.  “Press Conference of Spiro T. Agnew and Margin G. Castillo,” July 7, 1970, series 3.7, box 4, Spiro T. Agnew Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries. 37.  “Remarks by the Vice President Announcing Opening of NEDA Headquarters,” August 21, 1970, series 3.7, box 4, Spiro T. Agnew Papers, Special ­Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.

242  Benjamin Francis-Fallon 38.  It was mostly the college students who had abandoned the Church, he claimed, while “mature voters and working-class youth” maintained their loyalty. “An Overview of Spanish Speaking Affairs for White House Perspective, May, 1971,” box 21, Robert H. Finch Files, SMOF, NPM. 39.  George Grassmuck, “On the Spanish Speakers: Caveats and Concerns,” June 15, 1971, box 16, Robert H. Finch Files, SMOF, NPM. 40.  “Confidential,” undated, but probably fall 1971, in Graham, Civil Rights during the Nixon Administration, 1969–1973, part 1, reel 3. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Alex Armendariz, the Mexican American political consultant who ­directed the Nixon Spanish-speaking campaign in 1972, considered addressing foreign policy a distraction from his efforts. Memorandum, Alex Armendariz to Henry Ramirez, June 19, 1972, Joseph M. Montoya Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, box 237. 44.  Quoted in Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, 128; Patrick J. Buchanan’s short volume, The New Majority: President Nixon at Mid-­ Passage (Philadelphia: Girard Bank, 1973), does not address Republicans’ efforts to reach the group. 45.  Quoted in Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 314. 46.  Proposed Department of Labor regulations would have extended to the “ethnics” of Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Catholics (and Jews) more generally, affirmative action protections that had previously been offered to other minorities, Spanish-speaking Americans among them. Yet, as John Skrentny and Thomas Sugrue point out, “the final version of the regulations was watered down to the extent that they became meaningless.” Sugrue and Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” 189. 47.  “Confidential,” in Graham, Civil Rights during the Nixon Administration, 1969–1973, part 1, reel 3. 48.  Memorandum, Charles W. Colson to John Ehrlichman, December 20, 1971, in Graham, Civil Rights during the Nixon Administration, 1969–1973, part 1, reel 3. 49.  See Ignacio M. García, Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000). 50.  Memorandum, Alex Armendariz to Henry Ramirez, June 19, 1972 (emphasis in original), Joseph M Montoya Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, box 237. 51.  Memorandum, Alex Armendariz to Frederic Malek, July 11, 1972, box 36, Committee for the Re-Election of the President Collection (CRP), Frederic Malek Papers, series 3: Citizens Groups, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA.

The Occasional Catholics  243 52.  “Proposed Statement by Dr. Henry Ramirez to the Platform in Miami,” box 37, Committee for the Re-Election of the President Collection (CRP), Frederic Malek Papers, series 3: Citizens Groups, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA. 53.  “Republican Party Platform of 1972,” August 21, 1972, American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents /republican-party-platform-1972. 54.  Max Frankel, “President Won 49 States and 521 Electoral Votes,” New York Times, November 12, 1972. 55.  Stephen Isaacs, “Nixon Gains Over ’68 in All Segments,” Washington Post, November 8, 1972. 56.  Tony Castro, “Texas Chicanos Voted GOP; New La Raza Unida Got 6%,” Washington Post, November 13, 1972.

CHAPTER 11

The Camden 28 Fratres Sororesque in Pace (Brothers and Sisters in Peace) Michelle Nickerson ★

Kathleen Ridolfi was arrested in 1971 by the FBI. Agents caught her and seven others raiding a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey, as part of their efforts to handicap selective service operations during the Vietnam War. After months of casing the site, the team had spent two to three hours vandalizing the government property—breaking into filing cabinets, sorting out the 1-A files that identified draftees most likely to be called up, and loading them into garbage bags for off-site destruction. As cautious as they had been, the burglars always knew how close they were to arrest, which is why Ridolfi remembers the moment as “surreal” rather than frightening. They were part of a larger, loosely organized network of antiwar activists that had been raiding draft boards around the country, a movement known as the Catholic Left. Many had already been arrested, some intentionally in public “hit and stay” actions, but others, like the Camden burglars, aimed to raid, evade arrest, and raid again—which is why their capture came as a disappointment but no surprise. First came rumblings as the armed pursuers scrambled up ladders to turrets flanking the upper-story office of the draft board. Then, as silhouettes flashed around the screened windows, reality settled in; the raiders came to 244

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r­ ealize that the yelling was not part of a prank. Finally, “FBI, don’t move!” Agents forced each intruder down to the floor—a knee in every back.1 The “Camden 28,” as Ridolfi and her coconspirators were named, became known to history through print and television media. They appear mainly in or as whole chapters in books about legal and political history. An Oscar-winning documentary film released in 2010 brought the action and subsequent trial to public television stations around the country.2 This draft raid and the others that collectively represent the Catholic Left have been studied as a movement within a movement, a religious offshoot of the larger peace efforts that proved so formative to the political and cultural landscape of the 1960s. However, even as the existing literature on the Catholic Left expands in terms of covering the who, what, when, and where of the movement, its analytic reach tends to keep questions about religion and politics distinct. Theologians study ideas and spirituality of the thought leaders while historians and journalists parse details, quite riveting, of the movement history. There are very good reasons why historians have avoided the theology: many of the ­participants were either not Catholic or really didn’t care about religion one way or another. Ridolfi stands as a useful example. Known to everyone as Cookie, Ridolfi is not Catholic, not in her mind now, more than four decades later, and she says she never was. Though she did briefly think “about a vocation” in high school and she knows that Catholic school culture has had an impact on her, she is not, in her words, “religiously” Catholic. Nevertheless, I suggest it might it be useful to study the extent to which Ridolfi’s activism and that of others in the movement developed from their relationship with the Church—its ecclesiastical structures, institutional spaces, community spaces, history, and theology. Cookie and many others, we will see, passed through the metaphorical doors of the Church more than once on the curvy path that led them into the peace movement. The study of American politics has much to gain from examining Catholicism in the Vietnam War era. U.S. historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, for decades, been amassing an impressing body of scholarship to demonstrate the importance of religious fervor to the formation of transformative social and political movements in the United States. No one would question, for example, the centrality of

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evangelical Protestantism to the emergence of radical abolitionism, the temperance movement, or progressivism. What has not been adequately integrated into our national history of social movements is the impact of Catholicism. The Church’s history in United States, international reach, and influence among ethnic whites demands that we ponder how ­Catholicism—as an intellectual, social, and cultural force—fed the larger waters of America’s long 1960s.3 The 1960s are remembered mainly for the youthful “new left” activism that mobilized students on university campuses and the civil rights movement that challenged white supremacy in the South. Though today’s religious fundamentalists often denounce “the sixties” as a fall from grace, when radicals and hippies sowed the dangerous seeds of secular humanism, historians have demonstrated time and again the significant extent to which men and women of the cloth became enmeshed in, ­radicalized by, and indispensable to movements for social and racial j­ustice. The religious institutions we rightly associate with the decade’s political transformations are Black Protestant churches—­ established centers of Black solidarity—that came to the forefront of the civil rights movement with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Quakers and Mennonites also had long histories of paci­fism that carried into the Vietnam era. Other leftists, we know, ex­perimented with non-­Christian traditions—Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American ­spirituality—to express their radical break with Western bourgeois culture norms. The draft board raids also help us to understand the larger impact of Catholicism on 1960s radicalism, which could be downright conservative. Women’s historians have documented the sexism of the New Left: how male leaders of Students for a Democratic Society and other groups relegated women to secretarial roles and derided female reformers who brought attention to the gender hierarchy within their ranks.4 Draft resistance was no less sexist, but it also cultivated spiritually rooted patriarchal ideals around male character building. The Catholic model of manhood went beyond the patterns established by radicals. As historian Marian Mollin has demonstrated, Catholic Leftists were referred to as a “brotherhood of scholars, students, and clergy.” Male participants talked about draft resistance as formative to their development into manhood,

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and Daniel Berrigan described resistance as “man’s movement toward himself.” It was a way to remove the “bars to manhood.”5 Hierarchies also developed around clerical status, age, and gender. Middle-aged priests, professors, and devout male laymen stood at the forefront. They were the strategists, decision makers, and spokespeople.6 Catholic radicals also broke with leftists over the issue of abortion. Many argued that they had to preserve all life, which included the fetus in the womb as well as victims of warfare. In later decades they stood firmly in opposition of the Roe v. Wade decision and a woman’s right to abortion on demand. The antiabortion statements made by leaders ­Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, and Gordon Zahn did not attract much attention from the media or scholars, perhaps because these radical pacifists never joined the ranks of the New Right. They did not fit the “culture wars” framework through which political observers tended to pigeonhole permissive liberals against religious conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s. A close study of Catholic radicals helps us to regard debates over abortion rights outside of the typical divides—feminist vs. anti-feminist, liberal vs. conservative, or Democrat vs. Republican— by directing our focus beyond the narrow range of actors and ideas. Scholars of Catholicism likewise have much to gain from studying the politics of radicals, particularly by asking questions about the catholicity of Vietnam War–era protest. American Catholicism is on the preci­ pice of significant transformation; indeed, many fear collapse as membership dwindles, convents close, and priestly orders contract. As the Church, both hierarchy and laity, faces these challenges, it must ask: who are we? What makes us Catholic? Catholicism has endured for centuries, in large part, because of canon law, revered traditions, and recognition of the Vatican as a common spiritual metropole. In this respect the Church is almost by nature conservative. In the same vein, however, one could argue that it has survived as the most successful international organization in modern history because of its adaptability—its willingness to address the needs of the world in its time. The Catholic and openly gay New York Times columnist Frank Bruni marked the occasion of Ireland’s historic referendum granting same-sex couples the right to marry by ­describing a Catholicism beyond the Vatican, a religion that pours out of the institutional church: “In Europe and the Americas in particular, the

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church is much more fluid than that. It harbors spiritually inclined people paying primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice. That impulse and tradition are as Catholic as any others.” He notes that the Irish who overwhelmingly voted to legalize gay marriage are Catholic; and that the stance of compassionate non­ intervention by bishops and the pope probably played a significant role in the outcome. It thus behooves us to study the catholicity that has survived and thrived as more than a religious identity. Bruni and others recognize a Catholic “ethnic” identity, which surely exists. However, the 1960s and 1970s also make visible a vibrant political identity as Catholics responded to the problem of war.7 The Catholic Church, which claimed 25 percent of the U.S. population, represented more than a minority religion in late twentieth-century America. By 1960 it was a historical institution with deeply embedded roots in American society, perhaps not as deep and widespread as Protestantism, but extensive enough to affect culture, society, and politics beyond the confines of its own walls. This brings us to the issue of terms. Catholicism describes a living global religious institution, centuries in the making and constantly reconstituted by its clergy, lay members, their relationship with each other, and the world around them. I am referring to the people, history, culture, rituals, and spaces that have given Catholicism its meaning and power in society. The official Church—meaning the clerical bureaucracy led by bishops—is a central part but not the only or even most important part of this history. The authority of the pope makes the Vatican’s international power a constant factor in any analysis of Catholicism. In fact, as conservatives asserted more influence under the papacy of Pope John Paul II in the 1980s, leaders increasingly opposed radicals and all but eliminated their influence within the “official” Church. Nevertheless, Catholicism became an organizing structure for peace and radical social reform politics even as it remained, in most ways, a deeply conservative institution. Catholic doctrine—encyclicals, schema, the Bible—as well as such influential figures as Pope John XXIII and the American founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement, ­Dorothy Day, served as intellectual inspiration to progressives. Indeed, Catholic social thought and liberation theology have yielded textual, in-

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stitutional, and on-the-ground artifacts demonstrating this broad impact. Beyond the intellectual roots of Catholic progressivism, however, it is also worth examining how the Church’s very structures and rituals shaped politics. I am referring to the extent to which parishes have organized neighborhood life in American urban centers; the social justice missionaries networked to each other through the church in the United States and beyond; the ascetic radicalism demonstrated by progressive women and men religious; rituals of prayer that anchored and disciplined worshipping activists in the most challenging moments of direct action; and Catholic reverence for the ordered life—for structure and rules. The experience of encountering the Church through these structures and rituals—whether one was a Catholic, non-Catholic, lapsed Catholic, or avowed atheist—influenced one’s quest to realize justice. Without attempting to study every political mark left by Catholicism as outlined in the aforementioned list, this essay focuses on the Camden 28 as an ­opportunity to examine some of these dynamics in action. The selective service succumbed to about forty draft board raids ­between 1967 and 1971 with most, but not all, waged by Catholic Leftist groups. For those who participated in the raids, they represented a nonviolent escalation of dissent against the Vietnam War—dissent that had taken various forms of expression and changed over time since the United States first launched ground and air strikes into the Indochina peninsula in 1964. The first draft board raids in Maryland (1967) deliberately alerted police in advance of the action so as to make the arrest part of a public ritual. In Baltimore the activists poured blood on the documents, and in Catonsville they burned them in a bonfire while saying the Lord’s Prayer. It is noteworthy that draft card burnings, by 1967, had become an established form of protest for a few years already. It was an expression of defiance of the American government, military, and ­society at large in which men of draft age came together to burn their own draft cards as a group action. Though the raid of draft boards can be interpreted, to a certain extent, as an outgrowth or escalation of personal draft card burnings, the Catonsville action indeed represented something new—the Catholic activists aimed to push the antiwar movement toward deeper effectiveness. Most of them, it should be noted, were not going to be drafted. Though some were certainly eligible, most were not by

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virtue of their age, gender, or another exemption status—they were priests, nuns, or students. Some had already fought in World War II. The demographics of the Camden group mirrored that of the larger Catholic Left. Of the twenty-eight, ten were women (more than onethird). Five priests and one nun represented the Catholic religious. The clergy participants included a Lutheran minister. The group was uniformly white: mostly Irish American and Italian American. Although a physician counted among the arrested, the Camden 28 did not represent professional or affluent Catholics. More so than the bearded radicals igniting college campuses, the Catholic Left drew from the working classes in that they were mostly children of workers, clergy who had taken vows of poverty, or workers themselves. Nevertheless, these working-class radicals were educated. If they did not have college or seminary degrees, it was generally because they had not gotten them . . . yet. Many of the youngest were taking a hiatus from university educations to participate in the movement. Most were somewhere on the spectrum of Catholic identity, from deeply devoted to completely lapsed. Ridolfi was in that spectrum somewhere; her family did not practice Catholicism when she was growing up. Nevertheless, she came to the anti­war movement by way of the parochial school system that structured the world of Italian South Philadelphia. She did not call herself a Catholic and yet was comfortable working with activists who relied on doctrinal sources and Christian faith to affirm their political positions. Ridolfi had been educated by nuns in the Marconi Plaza neighborhood, a cluster of tight gridiron row-house city blocks that marks the architectural ­vernacular of Philadelphia to this day. Two or three years after ­graduation, one of those nuns brought her into the movement.8 Women and men religious acted as galvanizing forces in American movement politics of the 1960s. This ecumenical mix that found God’s work in radical reform had always included an influential cadre of priests and nuns—the men and women in black. These progressives viewed peace as the calling of their day, turning often to the Gospels to fortify their endurance in the midst of sustained condemnation from church authorities, the public, media, and the government. Although vows of celibacy had generated ceaseless speculation about the possibilities of aberrant sexual behavior among Catholic religious—as the recent priest

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abuse scandals have affirmed—the perceived asceticism of activist priests and nuns in the 1960s seemed to bolster their moral ­authority. Without spouses or children and very little in the way of property, many spent their full-time waking hours seeking to realize the justice goals that most liberals talked about or sought to accomplish in squeezed-in volunteer hours. The collar and the habit could thus represent authenticity, steadfastness, or morality in the leftist imagination as much as it could severity and traditionalism. But Ridolfi did not feel uniformly companionable toward nuns. Her attitude, in fact, exhibited an evolving tension with church authorities that many Catholics and non-Catholics would experience by virtue of the Vatican II reforms. Ridolfi had been born into an era of modernization, even before the council met in Rome between 1962 and 1965 to shepherd through pathbreaking transformations that would open Catholicism officially to the twentieth-century world. As a child of the 1950s, she attended grade school at a time when nuns represented both the best and worst kind of power. For many Catholic girls, the sisters were the social corset that restricted them in almost every way, but then women religious modeled lives of power, choice, independence, and accomplishment that some often coveted. As historian Colleen McDannell notes, parochial school pupils saw sisters “exert piety, professionalism, and authority.” Though they did not exercise the independence of colleague priests, to whom they were required to show deference, the fathers would rarely, notes McDannell, “interfere with a Mother Superior when it came to running a school.”9 To be Catholic and female before the 1970s meant navigating the intense pressure to perpetuate the family ideal. For those who entertained a vocation—meaning that they considered becoming a nun—that aspiration often meant a life committed to teaching, school administration, social work, or nursing. The religious life thus stood as an alternative to housewifery and child rearing. Ridolfi’s activist career started when a teacher from her high school asked her to assist with an action. Unlike many of her cohorts, Ridolfi had not been inspired to act by what she was reading. She was not familiar with Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris or the works of Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day. She only read the daily Philadelphia Inquirer and watched television news. Her aunt and mother (who raised her) and her

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brothers at home also read and watched the news, but they didn’t take a position on the war one way or another. Ridolfi’s opinions were going in their own direction, partly because several friends from her elementary school had been called up to serve in Vietnam. One died in battle. She became involved in antiwar demonstrations with other students at the Temple University campus. Then Mary Cain, that nun from her high school, asked for her help with the Philadelphia raid. Cain was soon indicted as part of the Harrisburg 8 case.10 Ridolfi came into a movement that was simultaneously radical and disciplined; she was not spiraling willy-nilly into a revolutionary netherworld. The Catholic Left managed to operate effectively for about four years because it was loosely organized—there was no formal structure— yet its members maintained a steadfast adherence to nonviolence. For Ridolfi, bonding with a religious fomented her political radicalism; the relationship she formed with the nun at her high school stands as not the only, but one of the most significant factors in the formation of her political consciousness. When she was about twenty, commuting to classes at Temple from her mother Kitty’s house on Ninth Street, between Porter and Shunk, Ridolfi was contacted by Sister Cain, who had mentored her through a tough time in her adolescence. Ridolfi had been a disinterested pupil at the St. Maria Goretti high school for girls, often disciplined, when Cain befriended and helped shepherd her through to graduation.11 Cain was not her teacher; she did not instruct Ridolfi in math, history, or catechism. She was a young woman religious in an urban school district who recognized a smart girl feeling bored and hemmed in by strict administrators at the school. Ridolfi remembers that their friendship started when she was storming out of school one day after having received another detention: “She said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m leaving this place. You know, I hate school. I hate nuns. . . .’ She said, ‘You’re right. I agree with you’—basically saying that school was hard and some people were unfair. . . . And I said, ‘You do?’ So we sat on the steps, right there, and talked. And she was this wonderful person. . . . From then forward we were the best of friends.”12 The Vietnam War was well under way by then. Within a few years, Cain left the convent, married, and threw herself into the work of the Catholic Left.13 She contacted Ridolfi and asked if she wanted to assist with some

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work, and before long Ridolfi was as immersed in the movement as Mary Cain Scoblick. If nuns were emissaries of the movement, priests were its torch­ bearers. For the Catholic Left, none proved more influential than the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. The Berrigans rallied nationwide attention when they evaded prison sentences after their own raids with the assistance of a sympathetic Catholic underground. They quickly galvanized other raiders over the late 1960s and eventually served several years behind bars for destruction of government property. Daniel was a Jesuit priest, and Philip was a member of the Josephite order before he married former nun and fellow activist Elizabeth McAlister. Dan was, and still is, embraced as a prophet of progressive Catholicism. He participated in actions, often alongside his brother, but became valuable to his cohorts and coreligionists for decades to come for the hefty corpus of poetry, plays, essays, and stories he has written. His writing career started in the early 1950s, but the prison sentences of the late 1960s and early 1970s made him yet more prolific. Philip was the brother organizer. Though he also published, he is remembered mainly for his motivational talents—for his fire. Charismatic, brilliant, and handsome, Philip was known to push fellow activists to the limit for the sake of peace. The ­Berrigans, observes Mollin, assumed the roles of modern prophet and apostle that the movement bestowed, mirroring the attitudes of “its ­religious base, where priests were valued above all others and where women, by definition of their sex, were excluded from authority.” Mollin contrasts the Catholic way of peace with the Quaker egalitarianism that had dominated American radicalism until that point.14 Radical priests also benefited from a decade of what Robert Orsi describes as “clerical noir,” a genre of Catholic stories featuring fearless hero prelates who ventured into dangerous crime-ridden neighborhoods to save abused and disadvantaged populations. “The hard-boiled priest combined the qualities of the martyr and the ward boss, the shamus and the desert father.”15 Among those influenced by the Berrigans was William Davidon, a professor at Haverford College in Philadelphia. Inspired by work of the Catholic Left, Davidon organized a successful raid of a nearby FBI ­satellite office in Media, Pennsylvania. This action undid the career of

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the renowned FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. As journalist Betty Medsger documents in her 2014 account of the raid and its aftermath, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Davidon and eight others stole suitcases of evidence proving that that the FBI was spying on political groups in the United States, on American citizens doing legal ­activities. The burglars sent copies of selected memos and reports to journalists who published them in news articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. Medsger was one of those journalists. These stories led to the Senate investigation hearings by Frank Church. Church’s investigation exposed Hoover’s Counterintelligence Program, aka ­ ­CO­INTELPRO. Indeed, the Church Committee’s final report in the mid-1970s led to greater congressional oversight of the FBI and other intelligence committees. The Media raid of 1971 ultimately caused embarrassment to the FBI and the Nixon administration from which neither would recover. Both institutions thus poured significant resources into finding and prosecuting the burglars. The FBI was never able to convict the Media raiders, but by closely following suspects from Media—including Ridolfi—they did manage to track the formation of the Camden 28 action.16 Davidon was not part of the Camden 28, but he did work with people who were arrested as part of the action and he was deeply influenced by the Catholic Left. In an interview with Medsger, Davidon described the stability he perceived in his Catholic cohorts—a constancy of conscience that he needed as debates about the value of violence and nonviolence fueled inter-leftist conflict. Davidon, an atheist Jew who taught philosophy at the university, had no intention of becoming a Catholic. He had befriended and worked with activists of every variety in the course of his political career—atheist, Buddhist, hippie, Baptist. The changing political landscape of the late 1960s, as Medsger explains, made the Catholic Left appealing both for its effectiveness and its safety: As Davidon thought about whether he should be willing to raid draft boards with the Catholic activists, he worried that what he once would have opposed doing he now thought might be acceptable. He probed his motivation. Given the madness of those days, he asked himself: Am I moving toward more effective protest, or am I moving

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down a slippery slope toward violence? The question was chilling. As he contemplated the challenge the question posed, he reminded himself that the war was escalating in new and terrible ways, and national leaders still didn’t seem to be listening. He became convinced that neither he nor his new colleagues, the Catholic peace movement draft board raiders, would let themselves go down that slippery slope. He had come to regard them as so grounded and disciplined in their commitment to nonviolence as both a humane way to live and as a strategy against war and for peace that he did not think it was possible for them to move into violence. Noteworthy is how Davidon perceived his Catholic colleagues, in  Medsger’s words, as “grounded” and “disciplined.” He saw, in Catholicism, a shelter from the combusting New Left and civil rights movement. The commitment to nonviolence that had been so central at the outset of both struggles had been waning over the late 1960s as Vietnam’s villages and countryside succumbed to carpet bombs and American peace and civil rights leaders fell to assassinations. Radical groups of late 1960s thus transitioned to what they regarded as “revolutionary” strategies designed to resist the brutality of white supremacy and the American military. While the war dragged on, demoralized activists came to feel it was their moral duty to escalate actions against the U.S. government. An SDS splinter group, the Weather Underground, formed in 1969 to bomb U.S. government sites responsible for implementing the war in Vietnam, taking as much care as possible not to harm or kill people. The Weathermen had been inspired, in part, by civil rights activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who, having lost patience with the passive Gandhian traditions that launched their organization, introduced “Black Power”—an ideology that champions Black nationalism and self-­ determination as the means for realizing racial justice. As self-defense and force gained vigor, Catholic nonviolence represented a peaceful ­alternative that men and women religious seemed to embody in their lifestyles. The Catholic Left also injected the peace movement with theology. Though most peace activists did not look for scripture or any other texts published before 1960 to justify their antiwar work, those with a

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r­eligious or philosophical bent appreciated the fastidious parsing of moral argumentation that Catholic Leftist indulged in their debates over the Gospels, papal declarations, and the Catholic Worker. Many participated in these discussions and at least as many, including Ridolfi, did not. The theology nevertheless maintained a spiritual dynamic that bonded Catholics and non-Catholics to the movement. By the time Ridolfi became active in the late 1960s, a rich layer of social justice exegesis had already been developing over several decades to fortify the Catholic Left with the spiritual wherewithal to face down authorities in the government, church, and cultural realm to realize their goals for peace. Pope Leo XIII brought the Church into a new era of social engagement when he released an encyclical letter in 1891 called Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor). Modern Catholics have developed a shared social and political identity around this Magna Carta of church doctrine. Naming employers as the primary agents for producing change, Leo condemns wealthy industrialists for amassing their fortunes at the cost of deteriorating working conditions for their laborers. Workers, he declared, had a right to dignity, a just wage, and taxes that did not debilitate them. Leo declared that the Church not only had a right to address social matters, but that it was morally obligated to do so. The most lasting impact of Rerum Novarum has been what twentieth-century Catholics have come to describe as their “social justice” tradition or social justice teaching. Movements spread mainly across Western Europe and the Americas, invoking the mandate for justice, worker dignity, organizational rights, and the common good. Though they have varied in specific goals and the social justice principles emphasized, most shared a central tension inherent from Rerum Novarum—its mixed messages about authority and worker organization. Dorothy Day, more than any other American Catholic, brought Rerum Novarum to the twentieth-century United States. Day was a Bohemian sophisticate and gifted writer active in Greenwich Village leftist politics when disillusionment with communism and a debauched personal life led her to the church. Like many converts, Day immediately adopted a strict, daily practice that exceeded the habits of her coreligionists born into the Church. But Day then developed an audaciously progressive movement that incorporated her spiritual regime. Working with

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her friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker, a newspaper that quickly grew into a network of social justice communities serving the poor in the early 1930s. Their goal was to promote “voluntary poverty and gospel nonviolence.”17 Catholic Worker “houses of hospitality,” operated by volunteers, sheltered and fed the urban poor. Catholic Worker communities, which have never been officially associated with the Church, sprouted around the country, mainly in struggling urban neighborhoods. The Catholic Worker movement ultimately became one of the most important institutional foundations of the Catholic Left by laying the theological groundwork for moral arguments against the Vietnam War. The newspaper and movement promoted peace along with social welfare, even when it became unpopular during World War II. Its radical pacifist refusal to support the Allies lost them followers. Starting in the 1950s, the Catholic Worker condemned the Vietnam War ten years before U.S. intervention. In a 1954 article editor Dorothy Day admonished Americans and other Westerners for waging the Cold War on false premises. Quoting a little-known French mystic, Theophane Venard, she denounced anti-­communist wars to preserve freedom and Christianity as violence perpetrated in defense of “possessions.” As historians Anne Klej­ ment and Nancy Roberts note, Day perceived religion and American non-­Christian habits fusing too seamlessly. “If, as Day believed, the United States was poised to fill the power vacuum in Indochina once the French forces retreated, then the nation’s reliance on a military solution embodied its loss of faith—its failure to rely on spiritual weapons.”18 The activist genealogy of the Catholic Left and larger peace movement reveals many intellectual roots in the Catholic Worker. Day was part of a leadership circle that developed over the 1960s through correspondence, publications in Catholic periodicals, and occasional meetings. Catholic Worker editor Jim Forest was among several activists who helped start the Catholic Peace Fellowship (CPF) in 1964, which quickly became the vital organizational center of Catholic protest against the war.19 In 1965 Day joined other peace movement leaders in signing a complicity agreement that pledged noncooperation with the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam. It was around that time that the Catholic Worker movement also began supporting conscientious objection and personal draft card

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burning as a form of collective nonviolence.20 The Berrigans, with support from Trappist monk Thomas Merton, soon led the way toward a more direct style of action later in the decade. Day, who favored the Gandhian nonconfrontational tactics that she and other pacifists had cultivated over the 1940s and 1950s, supported the draft board raids but would not participate.21 Nevertheless, the Berrigans regarded Day as a mother and a teacher.22 Abbie Hoffmann called her the “first Hippie.”23 The Berrigans had been raised in the Catholic social justice tradition by their uneducated but devout parents. In the 1940s, Philip served in World War II and Daniel discovered the “worker priest” movement while studying abroad in Europe. These experiences ignited their radical consciousness.24 After the brothers returned and busily implemented the wisdom gained from overseas, Merton, a Catholic convert and European transplant, developed a theology of nonviolence in Kentucky in the Abbey of Gethsemani. Merton, the Berrigans, and other intellectual lights of the Catholic Left quickly became familiar with each other over the early 1960s through their published writing; eventually they started corresponding and soon met at a retreat called by Merton at Gethsemani in 1965. It was a small group that came together for the “Spiritual Roots of Protest,” eleven Christian men, Catholic and non-Catholic. One could “only speculate,” writes Gordon Oyer in his account of the gathering, “on the impact that Dorothy Day or some other female pacifist voice may have provided in its conversations.”25 But women were not permitted in the abbey. Merton led discussions about how to lead Christian non­ violence to more fruitful action—which, the group agreed, seemed to lack influence. Out of the retreat emerged a commitment among many of the members to escalate resistance against the Vietnam War.26 The peace activists also took advantage of Vatican II, which lay and ecclesiastical Catholics were only just beginning to interpret and implement as the globally transformative council it was to become. Convened between 1962 and 1964, the Second Vatican Council brought bishops, priests, lay Catholics, and theologians together to consider reforms. Among the most transformative were the allowance of vernacular languages into worship, the acknowledgment of laity as full members of the established Church, and the injunction to make peace and economic and social justice. Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), an encyclical released in 1963 by Pope John XXIII, sought to reach beyond Catholics to all human

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beings of “good will” troubled by the Cold War and escalation of nuclear tensions that had recently come to a head with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The pope declared a litany of rights and duties, including the rights to life, security, and the freedom to express opinions balanced with the duty to preserve life. He urged heads of state to similarly collaborate at an international level by supporting the United Nations, asserting that “national structures were inadequate to promote the common good.” And he exhorted all people to take a more active role in public life, ­unifying “faith and action.” Another Vatican II text, Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World), proved equally influential for progressive Catholics. Produced by a commission and altered by a 2,300-person assembly of clergy and laypersons (including nuns), Gaudium et Spes loosened the hold of traditionalism by urging Catholics not to turn against modernity outright, but rather to utilize technology and modern culture to spread the Gospel. It asserted that everyone needed to advance economic and social justice, with a statement emphasizing that women—idealized in traditional Catholic iconography for a quiet femininity—needed to participate in “cultural life.” Especially important to the peace movement was the document’s discussion of moral obligations in the time of modern warfare. Gaudium et Spes was transformative because, as a centuries-old religious community, the Catholic Church did not enter the Cold War era with a reputation for its peacemaking role in the world, mainly because church leaders and theologians, relying on centuries of the “just war theory” outlined first by Augustine in the fifth century and then by Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century, relied on state leaders to make decisions about wars. Augustine drew from the Old and New Testaments to show that peace was the goal, but sometimes warfare represented the means to achieve peace. Aquinas elaborated on Augustine by articulating the conditions for a war to be just, namely that it had to be declared by a lawful public authority in the interest of the common good. As history has demonstrated, however, the definitions of just and common good have been flexed liberally throughout the ages to slaughter nonconformists. But Gaudium et Spes, without defying these established principles outright, sought to update its theology for the realities of the twentieth ­century. It regulated the terms just and common good to place

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more r­ esponsibility for peace and warfare on the moral conscience of all thinking people rather than the state officials who declared war. It legitimated nonviolence and conscientious objection, for example. It also declared “just defense” as permissible while condemning wars of “subjugation” and wars in population centers. The document also called upon the world to stop the arms race and build community through international organizations.27 Though Vatican II was a men-only gathering that had almost nothing to declare about or for “women” as a distinct group, female Catholics nevertheless embraced and carried out many of the decrees from Rome as if the pope and bishops had been writing just for them. In church history this period is called aggiornamento, or the era of modernization. This generation of women that can thus best be called “the aggiornamente.” They were the midcentury Catholic women galvanized by Vatican II as well as national and global developments convulsing around them. The aggiornamente included the “new nuns,” documented by Amy Koehlinger, who elected to live in the disadvantaged communities where they worked, dwelling in apartments and without habits as a means to be “in” the worlds they served. The aggiornamente was a large, international, and politically diverse group that included the civil rights marchers and Maryknoll missionaries in Latin America, but also opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, Marianist anti-communist prayer groups, and “pro-life” housewives.28 Aggiornamento inspired women on the left and the right.29 Despite the aggiornamente, the church remained deeply conservative when it came to issues of gender, family, and sexuality. The Catholic Left mimicked this structure, but so did most radical groups of that generation. Men dominated in the planning and strategy formation while stepping forward as the spokespeople and the faces of the movement. Women assumed the secretarial and housekeeping work that men let go. They procured supplies, transported people and materials, provided food, or maintained the apartments that housed everyone who did this work leading up to the raids. They cased buildings along with the men. For the Camden trial, women also did a significant portion of the unpaid jury selection preparation. In 1971 law firms did not hire professionals to research jury pools as they often do now. Such work, at the time, repre-

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sented a new and experimental method for defense teams to level the playing field—to obtain information through grunt work that government prosecutors had by virtue of their special access. Once the pool was announced, these volunteers also researched individual jurors by making phone calls to neighbors and patronizing their hairdressers—it was all legal. Many women, moreover, did the most dangerous work of breaking into the draft board office along with the men. Ridolfi and Rosemary Reilly, two of the eight who raided the Camden draft board office, were women. Ridolfi was cook, housekeeper, secretary, jury researcher, burglar, and fugitive. Many of the Catholic Left women consequently found their feminist consciousness awakened through the work left by men for them to do— typing, cooking, cleaning, and housework. Ridolfi remember that some of the younger men in the movement helped in the kitchen and assisted with other chores here and there, but not most of the male activists.30 In letters to each other, the Berrigans quite explicitly declared that women’s liberation represented a distraction from the primary goal of ending the war.31 In her own book, Mollin shows how the movement valorized the criminal work that men tended to do as sacrificial. The fugitives and outlaws called themselves “warriors for peace.”32 Also, as the draft board raids ebbed with the end of the 1960s, many dropouts blamed movement fatigue on excessive pressure exerted by the Berrigans, particularly intimidation by Philip. As biographers Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady explain, Phil Berrigan’s approach to organizing raiders was “If you’re not doing this, you’re not doing anything.”33 Most did drop out of the movement; Camden was one of the final actions. No one speaks of a Catholic Left anymore. However, the radical pacific traditions and social justice teachings that ignited the draft board raids persist. Newer generations are learning the theology and tactics of Vietnam-era activists who continue to face arrest, pray, and sit in jail with their fresher-faced allies. Among the most enduring groups of peace-­ loving lawbreakers is Plowshares—a small but devoted movement that started in 1980. Originally the idea of Philip Berrigan, Plowshares derives its name from the biblical calls in Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to “beat swords into plowshares.” Activists bang hammers and pour blood on nuclear weapons.34 As journalist Eric Schlosser notes, however, Plowshares

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has been on the margins of the antinuclear movement mainly because of its refusal to deviate from its total demand for complete abolition of ­nuclear weapons, and because of its refusal to deviate from adherence to strict and radical codes of justice that usually involve lawbreaking. Over three and a half decades, they have attracted minimal attention.35 However, the arrest and imprisonment of Sister Megan Rice, an eighty-twoyear-old nun, breathed new life into Plowshares. Rice and two other activists broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2012. After the three were found guilty of interfering with national security, the national media generously attended to the octo­ genarian pacifist-convict until a U.S. court of appeals overturned federal district court ruling in May 2015, freeing and exonerating the activists.36 Abortion politics, meanwhile, put distance between Catholic peace activists and the American left. Years before the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision and conservative Christian women launched a successful battle to stop the Equal Rights Amendment from passing, abortion became a target of the Catholic peace movement. Leaders and founders of the CPF, Pax Christi, and the Catholic Worker— organizations that launched many of the draft board raiders—stridently denounced abortion as a moral equivalent of warfare. Among the most outspoken critics was the sociologist Gordon Zahn, a revered and courageous pacifist who exposed the work of German priests in Hitler’s Third Reich despite the efforts of the Vatican to suppress his work. In his 1992 book Vocation of Peace, Zahn wrote, “It is not just a matter of consistency; in a very real sense it is the choice between integrity and hypocrisy. No one who publicly mourns the senseless burning of a napalmed child should be indifferent to the intentional killing of a living fetus in the womb.”37 The Berrigans and McAlister spoke out against abortion also. Tom Cornell, a CPF founder, declared that “Catholic pacifists [were] opposed to war because it is the planned, mass taking of human life for political purposes . . . [and they were] opposed to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and economically enforced starvation also, on the same basis.”38 Radical but devout, Catholic pacifists found meaning in the Church’s life ethic as it had been outlined in texts such as Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, yet could not express their moral and theological position within emerging religious right organizations or the Republican Party. They con-

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demned abortion alongside conservatives in their church but never became political allies. They tended to be nonpartisan, maintaining a stance consistent with the Catholic Worker tradition since the 1930s, when Day championed the rights of workers while condemning Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare and abortion (openly regretting her own).39 Indeed, Catholic mistrust of centralized state politics has long kept its radical social justice devotees from full membership in leftist or rightwing movements. Vatican II provided a temporary spell of momentum and unity around antiwar and antiabortion politics, when liberal Catholics rallied around the concept of a “consistent life ethic.” The theological ideal originated among pacifists but became more mainstream when articulated in a lecture by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in 1983: “Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.”40 In Vocation of Peace, Zahn condemns “abortion on demand,” which he describes as “abhorrent,” but argues against using state authority to impose moral judgment when the political community is so fractured with respect to the issue.41 Radical Catholic pacifists thus operate most comfortably independent of the ­political spectrum, which seems to shift often beneath their feet. Which brings us back to the problematic Catholic Cookie Ridolfi. She got a call one day from Daniel Berrigan, asking for her support on their life position. She did not. Ridolfi could be seen as one of those activists who “dropped out” of the movement. But the movement didn’t exactly drop out of her; she is a Catholic radical through and through. After the trial Ridolfi went on to earn a B.A. from Rutgers. She wrote a letter to the university explaining that she had tried to change the world as an outlaw, and now she wanted to do it within the parameters of the legal system. Rutgers gave her a full scholarship.42 After graduation she became a consultant assisting in jury selection in other political cases. She also worked at her own private investigative agency, Nancy Drew Associates. In 1982 she earned her J.D., also from Rutgers. In her first job as an attorney, she represented Philadelphia’s urban poor as a public defender. Then, in 1990, Ridolfi joined the law faculty at the City University of New York. While a jury worker with the National Jury Project, she was a leader in the development of expert testimony for battered

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women. The troubled South Philadelphia teen who once wondered if she would even graduate from high school became a senior law professor at Santa Clara University and cofounder of the Northern California Innocence Project. Her scholarly research focused on prosecutorial overreach and clemency. In short, Ridolfi went on (and continues) to have a productive career in wrestling mercy from our legal system. She never wore a habit, and she does not attend Mass, but her life’s work bears important strains of the social Catholic teaching that radicalized her.

Notes 1.  Cookie Ridolfi, interview with author, February 25, 2014, 1. 2.  Marian Mollin, “Communities of Resistance: Women and the Catholic Left of the Late 1960s,” Oral History Review 31, no. 2 (Summer–Autumn 2004): 29–51; Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Rosalie Riegle, ed., Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012); Edward McGowan, Peace Warriors: The Story of the Camden 28 (Nyack, NY: Circumstantial Productions, 2001); Marian Mollin, Radical Pacificism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Gordon Oyer, Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014). 3.  Center for Research in the Applied Apostolate, Georgetown University, Frequently Requested Church Statistics, https://cara.georgetown.edu/frequently -requested-church-statistics/http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requested churchstats.html. 4.  Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1980), 105–125. 5. Mollin, Radical Pacifism, 172–73. 6. Ibid. 7.  Frank Bruni, “On Same-Sex Marriage, Catholics Are Leading the Way,” New York Times, May 27, 2015, Opinion, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27 /opinion/frank-bruni-on-same-sex-marriage-catholics-are-leading-the-way .html.

The Camden 28  265 8.  The work of the Vietnam-era Catholic Left has been documented mainly in Catholic university presses and periodicals, though some scholars have contextualized the events beyond the Catholic experience through venues that reach a wider readership. See William A. Au, “American Catholics and the Dilemma of War, 1960–1980,” U.S. Catholic Historian 4, no. 1 (1984): 49–79, and Mary Henold, “Breaking the Boundaries of Renewal: The American Catholic Underground, 1966–1970,” U.S. Catholic Historian 19, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 97–118; Marian Mollin, Radical Pacifism; Patricia McNeal, Harder than War: Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); William O’Rourke, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012; first published in 1972 by Crowell); Shawn Francis Peters, The Catonsville 9: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Polner and O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous; Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 9.  Colleen McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 27. 10.  Cookie Ridolfi, interview with author, February 25, 2014, Santa Clara, CA, audio recording. 11. Ibid. 12.  Cookie Ridolfi, interview with author, 21. 13.  Mary Cain Scoblick became involved with exactly the right people at the right time to become a prime target of the federal government. In 1971 she and her husband, Anthony Scoblick, the Berrigans, Elizabeth McAlister, William Davidon, and Pakistani journalist Eqbal Ahmad were indicted for conspiring in various criminal plots against the federal government, including one to assassinate National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The FBI and federal prosecutors, as Freedom of Information Act documents have since revealed, arrested and tried the so-called Harrisburg 7 on specious evidence. The government failed to convict when the trial resulted in a hung jury. 14. Mollin, Radical Pacifism, 173. 15.  Robert Orsi, “U.S. Catholics between Memory and Modernity,” in Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, ed. R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 37. 16.  Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (New York: Knopf, 2014). 17. Mollin, Radical Pacifism, 164. 18.  Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, “The Catholic Worker and the Vietnam War,” in American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the

266  Michelle Nickerson Catholic Worker Movement, ed. Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts (London: Praeger, 1996), 154. 19. Penelope Adams Moon, “Peace on Earth–And Peace in Vietnam,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 1035. 20.  Klejment and Roberts, “The Catholic Worker and the Vietnam War,” 160. 21.  Ibid., 163. 22.  Nancy Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 165. 23. Ibid. 24.  Polner and O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous, 246. 25.  Gordon Oyer, Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 9. 26.  Polner and O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous, 108–109. 27.  Ibid, 56–57. 28.  Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, introduction to The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 29.  Amy L. Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9. 30.  Ridolfi, interview with author, 15. 31. Mollin, Radical Pacifism, 176–77. 32. Ibid. 33.  Polner and O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous, 246. 34.  Ibid., 347. 35.  Eric Schlosser, “Break-in at Y-12: How Pacifists Exposed a Nuclear ­Vulnerability,” New Yorker, March 9, 2015, 51. 36.  Associated Press, “Tennessee: Nun’s Sabotage Overturned,” New York Times, May 8, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/us/tennessee-nuns -sabotage-conviction-overturned.html?_r=0. 37.  Gordon Zahn, Vocation of Peace, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1991), 77. 38. James R. Kelly, “Finding Renewal: Why the Pro-Life Movement Should Return to Its Roots,” America: The National Catholic Review, February 16, 2009, http://americamagazine.org/issue/686/article/finding-renewal. 39.  Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 55–56, 274. 40.  Kelly, “Finding Renewal.” 41. Zahn, Vocation, 69. 42.  Ridolfi, interview with author, 19.

CHAPTER 12

In Defense of People Environmentalism and the Religious Right in Late Twentieth-­Century American Politics K e i t h M a k o t o Wo o d h o u s e ★

Patrick Buchanan won nearly a quarter of the vote but lost every state to President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 Republican Party primary. He spoke on the opening night of the Republican National Convention in August, urging his supporters to give their allegiance to the president and also using the opportunity to push his own campaign’s agenda one last time. “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” Looking ahead toward the grim possibility of a Clinton presidency, Buchanan marched through a series of issues increasingly associated with electoral politics and the rise of the Christian Right: abortion, gay rights, “radical feminism,” and restrictions on parochial schools. Then he focused his attention on the environmental movement and on “environmental extremists who put insects, rats and birds ahead of families, workers and jobs.” He spoke of Hayfork, California, a town “under a sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside nine million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl, forgetting about the habitat of the men and women who live and work in Hayfork.” Al Gore, Buchanan claimed, believed that the 267

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“­ organizing principle” of society should be the environment; Buchanan believed it should be “freedom.”1 Two decades after the convention the New York Times remembered Buchanan’s speech as defining conservative politics for a generation. The Times’s Adam Nagourney listed all of the by-then familiar culture war issues the speech had touched on. Environmentalism was not among them. The environmental movement never occupied the same prominent place in the larger culture wars that Buchanan granted it at the 1992 convention. Buchanan described his “cultural war” in explicitly moral and religious terms—terms that left no doubt as to where devout voters should side on questions like gay marriage and women serving in the military, but which never fit environmental issues. While religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson and organizations such as the Christian Coalition made clear statements regarding gender roles, sexuality, and reproductive rights, they had far less to say about national parks and natural resources. Environmental debates had been unmistakably partisan since at least the Reagan administration, but had rarely been matters of faith.2 Buchanan’s invocation of environmentalism is easy to forget because the environmental movement had its own distinct and complicated relationship to the sort of Christian conservatism that would figure so centrally in the culture wars. Environmental policy was a political flash point in the 1980s and 1990s but often at some distance from fiercely contested questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Scholarly treatments of Christianity and environmentalism have tended to ignore the late twentieth century and have more often concerned themselves with basic and long-­ standing philosophical beliefs less situated in time and place. Given the various foundational claims made by Christians and environmen­talists, this makes some sense. But the complicated relationship between the two groups in the late twentieth century was as much a product of its times as it was of essential truths.3 Few people were more subject to that time and more concerned with those truths than the pastor, priest, and social critic Richard John Neuhaus. And few theologians offered a more extensive critique of the environmental movement, one that held fast throughout Neuhaus’s several transformations. Over the course of three decades Neuhaus migrated

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from left to right, from a progressive Lutheran suspicious of “the establishment” to a conservative Catholic and adviser to George W. Bush, all the while maintaining a basic distrust of environmentalism. In all of his various political incarnations, Neuhaus remained convinced that while religion cultivated and structured democratic processes, the modern environmental movement threatened them. His long-standing and consistent dispute with environmentalism points toward ordering principles distinct from those generally associated with the culture wars. Environmentalism and Christianity in the late twentieth century tended to approach each other on terrain defined less by the left and the right than by unease with a growing sense of individualism and an emphasis on collective purpose. Neuhaus believed that Christianity and environmentalism reached for disparate ideals and so had little in common. But his own fixation on the dangers of environmentalism was likely a product of Christianity and environmentalism’s similar anxieties about individualism and liberal humanism, and their distinct responses. Neuhaus saw environmental principles as in direct competition with religious ones, and so he missed much of what he had in common with his environmental antagonists.

Christianity and Environmentalism Christians and environmentalists of various stripes were not unfamiliar with each other; the two groups mingled and overlapped for much of the twentieth century. The British Romantic tradition from which American environmentalism drew much of its aesthetic sensibility associated the majesty and terror of the natural world with the glory and power of the divine. That same sensibility inflected the writing of environmentalists from John Muir to Wendell Berry to Bill McKibben. Christian thinkers concerned with environmental decline have similarly ranged across the twentieth century, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Thomas Berry and from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference to Creation Care. Theologians such as James Nash, John Cobb, and H. Paul Santmire weighed humanity’s biblically ordained dominion over the earth against a self-consciously restrained stewardship. Santmire wrote of “man’s

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t­ranscendence of and immanence in nature,” the former establishing ­hierarchy and the latter demanding a gentle respect.4 The philosophical relationship between earthly concerns and heavenly devotion was never straightforward. Some observers went so far as to argue that Christian belief and environmental thought represented fundamentally conflicting philosophies. “Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed,” the medieval historian Lynn White said of Christianity’s triumph over paganism, “and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.” Roderick Nash, nodding toward White, claimed that the Christian church labeled Saint Francis of Assisi a heretic for his nature-centered views. “Christianity,” Nash wrote, “had too much at stake in the notion that God set man apart from and gave him dominance over the rest of nature (Genesis 1:28) to surrender it easily.”5 Although the one-sided view held by White and Nash soon fell out of favor, it is true that faith and a green sensibility have often fit together uneasily. Despite the varied connections between Christianity and environmentalism and the many attempts to understand one in terms of the other, in late twentieth-century American politics Christians and environmentalists tended to stand on opposite sides of fights over policy and principle. The issues most central to this split, and the catalysts for a much broader philosophical tension, were overpopulation and abortion. Abortion moved to the center of Christian politics in the United States after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Environmentalists’ worries about overpopulation and subsequent advocacy for reproductive rights drove a wedge between Christian activists and the environmental movement. Green activists such as Paul Ehrlich and Stephanie Mills attacked the Catholic Church’s position on birth control, and it was an environmentalist—Garrett Hardin—who coined the phrase “abortion on demand.” In response, fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell wrote of “naturalists” who had no sense of the profound meaning of human birth and considered people little more than “biological machines.”6 The abortion debate signaled a wider set of ethical positions that environmentalists and Christians later applied to the politics of the culture war years. Like political magnets, the very qualities that could keep environmentalism and Christianity apart could also bring them together.

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The 1970s most firmly established this push-pull relationship. It was a decade, according to the historian Thomas Borstelmann, defined by “hyper-­individualism”—not the simple narcissism of Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” but a more complicated mix of left-wing egalitarianism and right-wing libertarianism that helped dismantle institutional barriers to entry while simultaneously legitimizing an uneven distribution of wealth and power, encouraging both greater equality of participation and greater inequality of rewards.7 The most important forces countering this hyper-individualism, Borstelmann claims, were environmentalism and religious fundamentalism. At best these two forces recognized the ways in which individualism must be tempered by common values and a sense of responsibility for one another; at worst, they tended to insist on a simple universalism that ignored matters of social and cultural difference. Encouraging a broader view, they assumed a bird’s-eye vantage from which uneven topography flattened out into an undifferentiated whole. In either case, environmentalists and religious fundamentalists called into question the political and cultural individualism of the 1970s and called for a more communal understanding of American society. Environmentalists worried that Americans were growing too acquisitive and wasteful with little concern for the planet, while fundamentalists worried that Americans were overindulging in sensual and material pleasures and paying little heed to long-­ standing values. Both believed that people were giving themselves to excesses that an ethos of individualism encouraged rather than restrained. From this perspective, the pluralism of the 1970s was a democratic force but also a centrifugal one; it fostered both toleration and atomization.8

Richard Neuhaus Richard Neuhaus was not, himself, a fundamentalist. But he wrestled— first as a Lutheran pastor and then as a Catholic priest—with the same questions of morality and governance that animated that community. And he sympathized with the attempt by evangelical Christians to reconcile, in Molly Worthen’s words, “private piety with the public square,” and in particular their insistence that religion always take the stage in

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public debate. As a Lutheran and then a Catholic, and always a champion of ecumenical work among Christians, Neuhaus tried first to build bridges between church and state and then to show that such bridges were redundant. Unlike evangelicals, Neuhaus had little trouble reconciling faith and reason, believing instead that the two could not be understood apart from each other. It was in the mold of religious belief that reason and democratic governance gained their form, he thought, and environmentalism threatened to break that mold.9 Ordained as a minister in 1960, Neuhaus soon gave himself to political activism as much as to his own calling. He chose an assignment at St. John the Evangelist church in Brooklyn, on the edge of Bedford-­ Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, a flagging parish that he reinvigorated. The church became a center of political activity and Neuhaus a regular agitator. He helped found Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam; he marched with civil rights activists; he was arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; and he protested the draft at his church and at New York’s induction center. Neuhaus was against the Vietnam War and in favor of racial equality, and like much of the New Left, he considered the United States an only marginally democratic society ruled by a powerful elite. “Government by the people, of the people and for the people,” he wrote, was “a noble sentiment” as well as “a dangerous lie.”10 It was when Neuhaus was most enmeshed in New Left politics that he first took on environmentalism. He was not alone, as a religious thinker, in his distrust of the environmental movement. Jesuit James Schall called environmentalism a “heresy” that stood “against the very institution—the polis, the civitas—out of which our civilization grew and in which it lives most freely.” Francis Schaeffer, taking the threat of pollution seriously, nevertheless warned of a pantheistic, nature-centered view that “always brings man to an impersonal and low place rather than elevating him.” Few theologians wrote about environmentalism with the seriousness that Neuhaus did, however. His In Defense of People described the “ecology movement”—as environmentalism was then known—as a project of “monied, misanthropic aristocrats” more concerned with ­scenery in national parks than with inequality in American cities. “The project of greening America,” Neuhaus insisted, “is obscene so long as

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vast areas of the world are parched by war and famine.” Ecology was a narrow, exclusive issue, “packaged as a bright new thing to titillate the appetite of culture and counter-culture.” It distracted rather than revealed, and dulled rather than focused intention. It was “diversionary, deceptive, and finally seductive of the radical impulse to change.”11 These were not unfamiliar charges in the early 1970s. The New Left as a whole never embraced the environmental movement, and those activists who did generally framed their own advocacy as opposed to the environmental mainstream. “Ecology sucks!” cried Fifth Estate, Detroit’s alternative newspaper. “It sucks the life out of social reform. It sucks the energy out of campus movements. It sucks the irritants out of capitalism. It sucks change out of politics. It sucks reason out of thought.” The ­ecology movement, many New Left activists believed, siphoned money away from crucial social programs, shifted blame from industrial polluters to society as a whole, and distracted from more urgent issues. In spirit, Neuhaus’s In Defense of People was not unlike New Left journalist James Ridgeway’s contemporaneous The Politics of Ecology, a book that called Earth Day an “exercise in futility.” At the Sylvan Theater on April 22, 1970—the original Earth Day—Rennie Davis said he would not be “tricked into an ecology movement that diverts us from our revolutionary purposes.” New Left activists were made even more uneasy by the eager involvement of corporations in Earth Day activities around the country. “The movement’s organizers called radicals to the barricades,” Neuhaus wrote, “only to find most of the choice places already taken by the executives of the corporate giants.”12 In Defense of People accused environmentalism of more than just ­elitism and antiradicalism, however. Neuhaus’s great anxiety was less what he believed environmentalists refused to do than what he believed they were determined to do. Beyond saving forests and reducing waste and cleaning up rivers, environmentalists worked toward more fundamental and reactionary ends. Environmentalism, Neuhaus wrote, “is in fact much more ambitious than these goals suggest. . . . Its propagandists are serious when they claim the movement is a revolution, especially when they claim it is a ‘revolution in values.’” And that “revolution in values”—a phrase Neuhaus used again and again—was essentially antihuman and apolitical. As a left-leaning pastor, Neuhaus believed any

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ethic that decentered human interests also threatened them, especially for poor and marginalized people. Chief among these interests was democracy. Defending this position at a 1972 conference convened by the Conservation Foundation, Neuhaus described a basic tenet of environmentalism as “that, somehow, history and human decision-making and politics must be made subservient to natural processes.” Ratcheting up the rhetoric, he told his audience, “The idea that nature—the presumed imperatives of nature—has a role in determining public policy is classically fascist.”13 “Fascist” in this case meant grounded in biological laws that stood in the way of democracy and human freedom. Again, Neuhaus was not alone in making this claim. Environmentalists of the early 1970s angered many on the left with their alarmist warnings about overpopulation and in particular the way they ignored the social implications of any policy designed to reduce the global population. “This is not the first time that racist hysteria and fascist practices . . . have been advocated by capitalist agents,” New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society, observed of environmental groups’ campaigns against overpopulation. Neuhaus stood firmly opposed to population as a political issue, believing that a focus on biology threatened to override reasoned debate. Two decades later, however, Neuhaus’s similarly staunch opposition to reproductive rights would complicate this seemingly unconditional defense of democratic choice.14

Crisis, Democracy, and the Public Square The notion that environmentalism threatened democracy was a product of environmentalists’ sense of crisis, in particular a crisis borne of too many people using too much of the world’s resources. “For to announce the apocalypse is, at bottom, to declare a state of emergency,” Norman Podhoretz warned in one of his frequent anti-environmental columns in Commentary, “and the suspension of normal liberties is one of the first things that happens when a state of emergency is declared.” This was not an entirely unjustified fear. Some environmentalists were already de­ bating the limits of democracy and individual freedom. A few—notably

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Hardin and William Ophuls—suggested coercive and even authoritarian measures for enforcing behavior and warding off environmental calamity. The path to these last resorts led, inevitably, through the belief that the modern industrial world was reaching a state of crisis. Environmental tracts such as Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, a special issue of The Ecologist reprinted as Blueprint for Survival, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth made this case. The runaway economic growth and material wealth of the mid-twentieth century had pushed the planet’s resources to their limits, these publications suggested, and soon the modern world would become an overcrowded, undernourished, and thoroughly polluted place in which human communities and the natural environment would begin to collapse. The only way to avoid such catastrophes, some environmentalists began to argue, was to forego the niceties of democratic reform and address crisis by fiat. Neuhaus felt as Podhoretz did; crisis talk raised his hackles and led him to judge e­ nvironmentalism— this “semireligious devotion to the gods of nature”—to be antidemocratic, antihuman, and more interested in following the dictates of a universal set of standards than engaging in the difficult specificity of political debate.15 To understand how Neuhaus, a devout Christian who engaged in politics with his theological commitments foremost in mind, could criticize environmentalists for subscribing to an apolitical and universal system of values requires an understanding of Neuhaus’s conception of religion in American life. By the mid-1980s, Neuhaus was still a Lutheran but an increasingly conservative one. During the 1970s he had grown skeptical of left-liberal social policy. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade shocked Neuhaus, as it did much of the emergent Christian Right, moving reproductive politics to the top of many Christian leaders’ political agendas. Then, just a few years later, the Carter administration organized a White House Conference on the Family to “see what we can do, not simply as a government but as a nation, to strengthen the family,” in the words of the president, who appointed Neuhaus to the conference’s national advisory council. Long before the conference convened, however, Carter agreed to change its name to the “White House Conference on Families,” acknowledging the diversity of family structures in the United States. Neuhaus resigned.16

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For Neuhaus, Roe v. Wade and the White House Conference on Families ignored the basic truth that American society was grounded in religious values. This premise aligned Neuhaus with the increasingly ­influential Christian Right, which held as axiomatic the notion that America was a Christian nation. But unlike evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Neuhaus wanted to claim religious roots for the United States while still paying full heed to American democracy and pluralism. Neuhaus believed that basic religious truths and democratic processes were not opposed to each other but were in fact braided. As a young member of the Missouri Synod in the 1960s, Neuhaus interpreted Lutheranism’s “two kingdoms theology” in its most fluid sense. God’s two kingdoms, of the Gospel and the Sacraments on the one hand and of law and public life on the other, were not separate. At least in this world, they were mutually constitutive. While evan­ gelicals tended to believe they should not have to convince the public of their views because they had biblical truth on their side, Neuhaus believed Christians should not have to claim divine sanction because they had the public on their side.17 This was the argument of Neuhaus’s most well-known book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, published in 1984. Its most basic claim was that the common perception of modern society as increasingly secular was wrong; the vast majority of Americans grounded their values in organized religion and understood questions of public policy and governance in terms of those values. Several larger claims rested on that initial one. The United States was a democratic ­nation that nevertheless “in recent decades systematically excluded from policy consideration the operatives [sic] values of the American people, values that are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief.” It was secular thought and not religious fundamentalism that put democracy at risk. The “naked public square” was, for Neuhaus, a civil society stripped of its religious and moral context. And that denuding made little sense, since politics, culture, and religion were all interwoven. Worse still, the public square could remain naked for only so long; something must clothe it. “If law and laws are not seen to be coherently related to basic presuppositions about right and wrong, good and evil, they will be condemned as illegitimate,” Neuhaus wrote. Public policy must rest on ul-

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timate claims about what society wants, and in the absence of organized religion, “secularism” would take its place. That, Neuhaus insisted, would amount to a dangerous state of affairs. Unchecked criticism from within a given community undermined social stability as much as did unexamined loyalty, through nihilism instead of through authoritarianism. Only a greater sense of shared values and beliefs could allow the passionate differences within the public square to flourish without jeopardizing the exchange itself. For Neuhaus, religion was essential to democracy.18

Humanism and Its Discontents Neuhaus was one among several Christian leaders who pointed to religion as a moral foundation for public life in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 H. Edward Rowe urged Christians to involve themselves in local and national politics or risk standing by as the nation fell apart. Three years later, Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority to mobilize Christian voters. In 1981 Rowe, Weyrich, Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Pat Robertson helped form the Council for National Policy to foster and further social conservatism among sympathetic politicians. Rowe, a Southern California minister, worried especially about what he saw as a growing emphasis on secular interests in a technologically sophisticated and spiritually impoverished modern world. In Save America!, Rowe’s 1976 cry in the night, he warned of the hubristic belief that people could achieve greatness without divine guidance. “Such ­humanistic self-confidence can only produce anarchy, totalitarianism, mass slavery, and the general deterioration of a civilization,” he wrote. There were only two broad ways of thinking about the world: Christianity and humanism. The second was “anthropocentric” and “groundless” and a “warped and dangerous thinking behind much of the social activism of our time.” Rowe was not an anti-modernist; he acknowledged the accomplishments of science and technology. But he cautioned against overestimating their power. “While we rejoice with Neil Armstrong and those who have followed him to the moon,” Rowe wrote, “let us not ­worship at the shrine of technology. And let us not fall into the trap of secular humanists, who elevate human reason to the place of supremacy.”

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To do so would be to enter a vast and empty world in which “man has no source of values, no ultimate point of reference, no high commitment, no hope except in himself.” Like Neuhaus, Rowe believed there must be some measure of what society accomplished beyond simple human desires and some heights to aspire to above what people alone could achieve for themselves.19 Similar complaints appeared just two years later in a very different book. In The Arrogance of Humanism, David Ehrenfeld defined humanism as “the belief that humankind should live for itself” coupled with “faith in the children of pure reason: science and technology,” both inflected by a general sense of “anti-Nature.” Those various correlates added up to the misguided and self-assured belief that people tended to use sensible means to achieve laudable ends. This presumptuousness about human ingenuity in an unfathomably complex world was, for Ehrenfeld, a lesser version of assuming that Earth occupied the center of the solar system. “In effect,” he wrote, “we still believe that the force of gravity ­exists in order to make it easier for us to sit down.”20 Ehrenfeld was a biologist and an environmentalist. His critique of humanism came from very different premises than did those of Rowe. He cared less about divinity and traditional values than he did about the effects of humanism on the natural world. Although he worried as well about the loss of traditional knowledge and historical landscapes, “wilderness” was his chief concern. His critique of humanism extended even to the mainstream conservation movement and its tendency, according to Ehrenfeld, to protect resources and places by granting them economic values, whether as spectacular scenery, recreational opportunities, or even essential elements of an ecosystem. All of these, he wrote, were ­“anthropocentric values,” and they extended human measures of worth into nature.21 That sort of extension was presumptuous because nonhuman nature had value in and of itself, a basic truth that Ehrenfeld suspected Christians knew in their heart of hearts. The greatest conservation effort ever described in Western culture, he believed, was in the Bible. Confronted with a threat to the entire world, Noah tried to preserve the reproductive capacity of each and every animal species. What Ehrenfeld called “the Noah principle” assumed the equal importance of all animals and

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even of all life. “For those who reject the humanistic basis of modern life,” he wrote, “there is simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily chosen part of nature has more ‘value’ than another part, so like Noah we do not bother to make the effort.”22 The fact that both Rowe and Ehrenfeld used the terms humanism and anthropocentric was not just a semantic coincidence. Ministers such as Rowe and Neuhaus held different views about democracy and pluralism but asked the same questions about modern society’s misplaced emphasis on individual human ends. Many environmentalists held the same basic concern. They believed the environmental crisis of the 1970s was not only a matter of inappropriate technology or lax regulation or insufficient public awareness; it was also a matter of essential values. In 1972, when the Sierra Club sued to prevent the Disney Corporation from building a ski resort in California’s Sequoia National Forest, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Sierra Club lacked legal standing because it had no immediate economic interests at risk. That ruling prompted a Southern California legal scholar named Christopher Stone to propose a means by which natural objects—mountains, rocks, valleys, trees—might gain standing in court, allowing “guardians” to sue on their behalf. The Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Circuit’s decision, but in a dissent Justice William Douglas cited Stone as evidence of changing attitudes toward the natural world. For Ehrenfeld, such changes were a “significant” step in the right direction, but with a long way to go. “I doubt that [Stone’s] suggestion will make much headway until humanism loses ground,” he wrote. For environmentalists like Ehrenfeld and Christians like Rowe, modern Americans were fixated on immediate pleasures and narrow goals and unwilling to take seriously a larger set of values that might emphasize collective ends stretching across space and time and even species.23 Despite sharing a broad perspective, however, environmentalism and Christianity never became firm philosophical allies. While environmental and religious leaders often made the same basic critique, they offered distinct correctives that were, to many, diametrically opposed. Few were more insistent on this point than Neuhaus. He had no argument with the most banal forms of environmentalism. “At its least exceptionable,” he wrote in Harper’s in 1971, “ecology is a housekeeping movement,

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wiping up the mess, teaching industry better toilet habits, and exerting political pressure to restrain the engineers of technology who give little thought to the social or natural consequences of ‘progress.’” Environmentalism was rarely at its least exceptionable, however. More often it proposed a “new consciousness” and a “new order of humanity.” Countercultural environmentalists in particular hinted that this new order would transcend the profane world of policy and reform. And at this point, Neuhaus wrote, it was “the worst kind of politics: the politics that refuses to see itself as politics.”24 In 1989 Neuhaus sensed the same threat channeled through the animal rights movement. Animal rights constituted “a marginal tradition . . . joined to the radical styles of the 1960s and to the ideology of the ecology movement that arose in the latter part of that decade.” Again, a philosophical focus on the natural world could undermine the truth claims of Christian theology in a democratic society. “In the biblical tradition,” Neuhaus wrote, “ensconced in our constitutional history, human beings are endowed with rights bestowed by the Creator. Outside that tradition and history, contemporary theories about the source and nature of human rights are a hodgepodge teetering on the edge of chaos.” Any movement protecting animals had to start from the basis of human-­ centeredness granted by God. And, in fact, Neuhaus was far more sympathetic a decade later when Matthew Scully, a Christian and conservative, decried the abuse of animals not on the basis of animal rights but instead Christian mercy and humility.25

“A Revolution in Values” It was during the 1980s and 1990s that Neuhaus migrated steadily from left to right, as he founded several institutes and edited a new journal and all the while remained wary of environmentalism. He presided first over a think tank called the Center on Religion and Society, built in name and content on the thesis of The Naked Public Square. “The public virtue of tolerance . . . is much better secured by a claim to moral truth than by the pretense that our differences make no difference,” Neuhaus wrote about pluralism in the Center’s newsletter. In the early 1990s the Center

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on Religion and Society folded after a dispute with its parent organization, the Rockford Institute. With new offices and funders, Neuhaus founded an organization called the Institute on Religion and Public Life, and he edited its monthly magazine, First Things. Neuhaus had by then moved firmly to the right, and much of the financial support for the institute came from neoconservative foundations. In 1990 Neuhaus converted to Catholicism. His views on environmentalism remained the same, based less in any partisan political stance than in his beliefs about how religion functioned in the public square.26 First Things looked askance at environmentalism. “The earth is far more fungible than the ecological Chicken Littles believe,” wrote Herbert London in the journal’s first year. First Things writers turned an ­especially suspicious eye on “deep ecology,” the radical strain of environmental thought that granted equal moral weight to people and nature and with which Ehrenfeld was arguably aligned. Elizabeth Kristol called deep ecology “the most radical critique to emerge from all the anti-­ Western Civilization movements of the past two decades.” First Things board member Thomas Derr, ostensibly writing about the fallacies of animal rights, traced those fallacies to environmentalism. The “cosmic perspective” of animal rights activists was “the contribution of the environmental movement to the debate,” and such activists’ “anti-humanism” was especially apparent “when it is joined to deep ecology.”27 In the 1980s a tiny wing of the environmental movement did, in fact, distinguish between a “shallow ecology” based in anthropocentric values and goals and a “deep ecology” that granted the natural world a moral worth equal to that of the human world, in the spirit of Ehrenfeld’s Noah principle. And some of these radical environmentalists put such theories into practice, in particular a group of wilderness activists called Earth First! Fed up with the delays and compromises of conventional democratic processes, Earth First! circumvented them by engaging in direct action, from blockading logging roads, sabotaging bulldozers, and living in trees to destroying industrial infrastructure. The group’s followers judged human society ignorant, advocated a collective humility, and described a world of limits. As Earth First! stalwart Dave Foreman put it, “Wilderness says: Human beings are not dominant, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has

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no right to take exclusive possession.” Such a philosophy, Neuhaus understood, swam against the current of modern progress and individual freedom; environmentalists threatened a “revolution in values.”28 Neuhaus glossed over the degree to which he was in the same business. He could comfortably insist that Christian values played a central role in American politics and still defend the democratic process in absolute terms because he thought, as he argued in The Naked Public Square, that the majority of Americans derived their essential views from religion. As long as he believed this was the case, his basic Christian values and his commitment to democracy would never come into conflict. Americans were fundamentally committed to Judeo-Christian morality and so democratic decision making would, in the end, produce the policies that he and his colleagues supported. But while Neuhaus did not ­advocate coercion in the same way as did Hardin and Ophuls, he was nonetheless troubled by the threat of unbounded individualism. Individual freedom—“autonomy,” in Neuhaus’s terms—was clearly desirable in opposition to totalitarianism, but it was nonetheless restrictive in the service of nothing more than individualistic ends. Ultimate freedom of the individual from common values and from a well-established system of morality was a hollow achievement and a volatile condition. “We are liberated from duty, from honor, from country,” Neuhaus wrote of such a condition, and without those higher virtues, democracy became un­ stable. “Autonomy alone, thought of as unqualified fulfillment of self, is a new oppression,” he explained. The strictures of traditional morality were in fact the keys that unlocked one’s shackles, and so individualism had to be bound not by the government but by a welcome set of moral proscriptions.29 When society turned away from higher virtues, traditionalists had to consider their own revolution in values. It took only the Clinton administration to stretch thin the ties between Neuhaus’s freedoms and proscriptions. In his first year in office, Bill Clinton tried to lift the ban on federal funding of abortion for poor women and to make abortion restriction more difficult at the state level. These policies attracted attention just a year after Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court case that antiabortion activists had hoped might overturn Roe v. Wade but which ended up affirming abortion rights. At a National Right to Life

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Committee convention in Milwaukee, Neuhaus compared the abortion debate to the struggle to end slavery in the years before the Civil War. “We as a country have been this way before,” he told the crowd assembled for his keynote speech. “Remember that at the time of Dred Scott all three branches of government were in the hands of pro-slavery forces.” There was the possibility, he suggested, of a crisis that might threaten the nation itself.30 Three years later Neuhaus’s concern about the direction of the country in the 1990s turned to alarm. In addition to the decisions and measures on abortion there had been federal court cases challenging school prayer and supporting gay rights, most notably Romer v. Evans in 1996, which found that a Colorado law opposing gay rights was unconstitutional. In the fall of 1996, First Things published a special issue warning the nation that crisis was at hand. Neuhaus’s introduction to the symposium was titled “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” The question the nation confronted, he made clear to his readers, was “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime,” whether “the government of the United States no longer governs by the consent of the governed.” Beyond that seemingly ultimate question, though, was one “still more sobering,” and the point at which democracy as form and Christian values as content began to diverge. “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” Neuhaus wrote. Traditional morality, and “especially morality associated with religion—has been declared legally suspect and a threat to the public order.” And participants in the First Things symposium would consider the possible responses to this dire state, “from ­noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”31 Most of those responses were already fact rather than speculation. In 1987 Randall Terry, a born-again Christian dedicated above all else to preventing abortions, founded the civil disobedience group Operation Rescue. Like radical environmentalists, Terry believed the nation and the world confronted a crisis that demanded immediate and uncompromising action. For Operation Rescue this meant blockading clinics that ­provided abortions. Neuhaus defended the strategy as in the tradition of

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Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. “There is no doubt in my mind” he wrote, “that, as nonviolent challenge to unjust law, it is a way that can find ample warrant in Christian ethics and venerable precedent in the American social experiment.”32 The naked public square was now a battleground. Neuhaus had called attention to the growing hostilities soon after Planned Parenthood v. Casey in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal. “For years, some of us have been writing about the ‘culture wars’ in which our society is embroiled,” he wrote. “We are two nations: one concentrated on rights and laws, the other on rights and wrongs; one radically individualistic and dedicated to fulfillment of the self, the other communal and invoking the common good . . . one typically secular, the other typically religious.” George Wiegel, Neuhaus’s longtime intellectual colleague, made the same point in stronger terms several years later while explaining the goals of “neo-conservative Catholicism” as represented by himself, Neuhaus, and Michael Novak. “The ‘culture war’ will be a major focus of our attention in the 1990s,” he wrote, “for what is at stake here, it seems to us, is nothing less than the moral legitimacy of the American constitutional order. . . . The moral philosophy lurking just beneath the surface of the court’s recent abortion decisions suggests that the ‘liberty’ referred to by the 14th amendment is now to be understood as the liberty of the autonomous, unencumbered self.”33 The autonomous, unencumbered self was, in the 1970s, a particular conception of egalitarianism through individualism. And it was what both environmentalism and the Christian Right called into question, offering instead connected, freighted selves situated in particular metaphysical schema or on a planet with measurable limits. Neuhaus believed that autonomy was a prison. “Beyond autonomy is the free acknowledgement of that by which we are bound,” he wrote, and with that acknowledgment came ultimate freedom. The Sierra Club’s David Brower likely disagreed with nearly all the specifics of Neuhaus’s sentiment, but not with the broad spirit. “The ability to accept freedom within the limits of the natural world,” Brower wrote in 1969, was finally liberatory. “In understanding those limits we define ourselves, and by that definition we can finally understand what our real possibilities are. We are set free to act in a truly human way by our comprehension of the whole within which we exist.”34

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Environmentalists and religious leaders criticized liberal individualism’s lack of common values, but with different notions of what those common values should be. “All rational thought requires the rule of some kind of law based on irreducible assumptions,” Molly Worthen writes. The problem for the evangelicals that Worthen discusses was their attempt to obey “multiple authorities at the same time,” in particular the reasoned debate of politics and scholarship and the bedrock beliefs of spiritual life. For Neuhaus the problem of multiple authorities was not between civil society and religious order, two sources of rule that he ­believed to be in concert, but rather between religious morality and an appeal to nature as the measure of social good.35 This tension between religion and environmentalism exposes a different fault line than the more familiar left-right divide of the culture wars. Neuhaus’s views on environmentalism, unchanging as he slid across the political spectrum, had far less to do with ideology than with a philosophical view of how society worked, or should work. They sprang from anxieties about fragmentation, individualism, and liberal humanism at a time when those most passionately pious or green saw crises—on the one hand moral, on the other material—that called for a communal response. At odds about what that response should be, environmentalism and ­religion stood apart even as they shared common ground.

Notes 1.  Patrick Buchanan’s speech to the Republican National Convention is widely available online, including at http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican -national-convention-speech-148 (August 17, 1992). 2.  Adam Nagourney, “‘Cultural War’ of 1992 Moves In from the Fringe,” New York Times, August 30, 2012. As James Morton Turner has argued, the Reagan era made environmentalism a more partisan rather than a newly partisan issue; see Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96, no. 1 ( June 2009): 123–48. 3.  For discussions of the culture wars with few if any references to environmentalism, see, for instance, David Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gary Nash and Charlotte Crabtree, History On Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage, 1997); and Richard Jensen, “The Culture Wars,

286  Keith Makoto Woodhouse 1965–1995: A Historians’ Map,” Journal of Social History 29 (1995): 17–37. Two recent and important studies of the culture wars have little to say about environmentalism: see Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), and Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Those works that do treat environmentalism and religion in a historical context tend to pay less attention to the late twentieth century and still less to the culture wars: see Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Thomas Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism As Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); and Max Oelschlager, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). One of the few treatments of religion and environmentalism in this period is Patrick Allitt, “American Catholics and the Environment, 1960–1995,” Catholic Historical Review 84, no. 2 (April 1998): 263–80. 4.  H. Paul Santmire, Brother Earth: Nature, God and Ecology in Time of ­Crisis (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1970), 133. On Muir and religion, see Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation, 169–70; and Dunlap, Faith in Nature, 42–67. For Wendell Berry’s conflicted views on organized religion, see, for instance, “God and Country” in Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 1990); and “The Gift of Good Land,” in Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: North Point, 1981). For McKibben’s take, see, for ­instance, Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox,” Harper’s (August 2005): 31; and McKibben’s many articles for Christian Century, including “Climate Change and the Unraveling of Creation,” Christian Century (December 8, 1999): 1196– 1197. Of particular interest as well is McKibben’s sermon at New York City’s ­Riverside Church on April 28, 2013, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=geIni_BwjGw. On the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, see Christopher Hamlin and John T. McGreevy, “The Greening of America, Catholic Style: 1930–1950,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 ( July 2006): 464–99. On creation care, see, for instance, Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian ­Vision for Creation Care (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001). 5.  Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 396–410, 1205; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 19. See also Arnold Toynbee, “The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 3 (1972): 141–46. Nash later offered a more nuanced view of Christianity and nature in The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 87–120. 6.  On abortion and Christian politics, see Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 111–32. On Falwell, Hardin, and the politics of overpopulation, see Thomas

In Defense of People  287 ­Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 157–60, 211–15. 7.  Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), also provides an excellent discussion of the rise of individualism and fragmentation of ostensibly shared beliefs, although it has little to say about environmentalism. 8. Borstelmann, The 1970s, 227–77. On environmentalism as swimming against the tide of a rising individualism, see also Jefferson Cowie and Nick ­Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, no. 1 (2008): 23. Robertson notes that fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell “lamented America’s obsession with ‘materialistic wealth,’ a view that many environmentalists shared.” See Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 215. Political philosophers have also bemoaned the shortcomings of individualism; see, for instance, Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996). 9.  Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–3. For Neuhaus’s views on fundamentalism, see The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); and Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” in Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds., Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987). 10.  Richard Neuhaus and Peter Berger, Movement and Revolution (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1970), 166–67. On Neuhaus’s career, see Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square (New York: Image, 2015); and for a more critical view, Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (New York: Anchor, 2006). On the draft protest, see Homer Bigart, “9 in Chains Stage Draft Protest,” New York Times, July 3, 1968. 11.  James Schall, “Ecology—An American Heresy?” America (March 27, 1971): 309. Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: A Christian View of Ecology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970), 30–33. Richard Neuhaus, In Defense of People: Ecology and the Seduction of Radicalism (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 30, 59, 80, 90–91. 12.  “Vote No on Survival,” Fifth Estate, February 19–March 4, 1970; James Ridgeway, The Politics of Ecology (New York: Dutton, 1971), 15; Neuhaus, In Defense of People, 84. On Earth Day and the Left, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 86, 95–96; and National Staff of Environmental

288  Keith Makoto Woodhouse ­Action, eds., Earth Day: The Beginning (New York: Bantam, 1970). On corporate involvement in Earth Day, see Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 102–103. 13. Neuhaus, In Defense of People, 177, 185; Richard Neuhaus, “In Defense of People: A Thesis Revisited,” in Environmental Quality and Social Justice in Urban America, ed. James Noel Smith (Washington, DC: Conservation Foundation, 1974), 64–65. 14.  “ZPG: Too Many People?” New Left Notes, May 1970, 8. 15.  Norman Podhoretz, “Doomsday Fears and Modern Life,” Commentary (October 1, 1971): 4–5; Neuhaus, In Defense of People, 256. On coercion and authoritarianism, see Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in Managing the Commons, ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977); and William Ophuls, “Leviathan or Oblivion?” in Toward a Steady-State Economy, ed. Herman Daly (San Francisco: Freeman, 1973). Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1971; first published 1968); Edward Goldsmith et al., Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe, 1973; first published 1972). See also Neuhaus, review of Garrett Hardin’s Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle, in Theology Today, July 1973, 185–90. 16.  On the White House Conference on Families, see Linker, The Theocons, 43–44; Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus, 222–23; and Self, All in the Family, 333– 35. For Carter quote, see Nadine Brozan, “White House Conference on the Family: A Schism Develops,” New York Times, January 7, 1980. 17.  On Neuhaus and Two Kingdoms Theology, see Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus, 108–109. 18. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 37, 132, 80, 82, 75. 19.  H. Edward Rowe, Save America! (Old Tappan, NJ: F. H. Revell, 1976), 20, 42, 43, 41, 48. On Rowe’s career generally, see Williams, God’s Own Party, 141–42, 194. 20.  David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6, 125–26, 18. 21. Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 254–61, 179–88. 22.  Ibid., 208. 23.  Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann, 1974); Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of ­Humanism, 208. 24.  Richard Neuhaus, “Not Nature Alone,” Harper’s (October 1, 1971): 100, 102. 25.  Richard Neuhaus, “Animal Rights and Wrongs,” Religion and Society ­Report, May 1989, 3. On Scully, see Neuhaus, “The Quality of Mercy,” National Review, December 31, 2002, 40–42.

In Defense of People  289 26.  Richard Neuhaus, “After Modernity,” Religion and Society Report, February 1988, 4. On the dispute with the Rockford Institute, see Richard Bernstein, “Magazine Dispute Reflects Rift on U.S. Right,” New York Times, May 16, 1989. On Neuhaus’s religious conversion, see Peter Steinfels, “Saying Luther’s Goal Was One Church, Noted Lutheran Turns to Catholicism,” New York Times, September 9, 1990. On his political conversion, see Peter Steinfels, “Christianity and Democracy: Baptizing Reaganism,” Christianity and Crisis, March 29, 1982, ­80–85. 27.  Herbert London, “Ecocatastrophe Again,” First Things ( June/July 1990): 9; Elizabeth Kristol, “History in the Past Perfect,” First Things (April 1991): 46; Thomas Derr, “Animal Rights, Human Rights,” First Things (February 1992): 23. 28.  Dave Foreman, “Earth First!” Earth First!, February 2, 1982, 5. On ­radicalism in the 1980s, see Keith Makoto Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 29. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 75. 30.  Robin Toner, “Anti-Abortion Group Maps Strategy,” New York Times, June 27, 1993. 31.  Richard Neuhaus (uncredited), “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” First Things (November 1996): 18, 19. For a behind-thescenes view of the First Things special issue, see Linker, The Theocons, 88–102. 32.  On Operation Rescue, see Williams, God’s Own Party, 222–26; Richard Neuhaus, “Dr. King’s Venerable Precedent,” Policy Review (Spring 1989): 95. 33.  Richard Neuhaus, “The Dred Scott of Our Time,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1992; George Weigel, “The Neo-Conservative Difference,” Pro Ecclesia (Spring 1995): 208–209. 34. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 17; David Brower, foreword to ­Maxine McCloskey and James Gilligan, eds., Wilderness and the Quality of Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1969), vii–viii. 35. Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 258.

CHAPTER 13

Looking Up Latino Megachurches and the Politics of Social Mobility K at e B ow l e r ★

Pastor Alberto Delgado took the podium of the House of Representatives to offer the 2009 morning prayer with a fitting solemnity. It was an impressive invitation from the House Republicans to act as guest chaplain and a moment of confirmation that the leader of a once-poor Miami church of mostly Cuban immigrants had become a man with a national platform. His megachurch was a place of miracles, raved Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart from Florida’s Twenty-Fifth District, and a sanctuary where “everything is possible with faith.” That phrase—“everything is possible”—was, in fact, the catchphrase of Delgado’s ministry and the namesake of his radio and television ministry (Todo Es Posible) that was broadcast to some fifty-two million potential viewers.1 Delgado’s message was always the same. The gospel he preached heralded a message of God-given economic solutions, channeled through each individual’s faith to bring wealth into reality. And it was the power of that faith that Delgado now invoked to solve the woes of the Great Recession. Delgado lifted his chin and reached out his hands as he prayed God’s mercy on the United States and declared the “positive confession” (a special term denoting the activation of spiritual power) that would bring 290

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about the end of the economic crisis: “This great country of ours will defeat this present crisis. It will enter a new level of prosperity and it will continue to be the example and the strength of the free world. Father, right now I release [wafting his hands toward the members] a special blessing upon the Congress of the United States of America. May your Holy Spirit fall upon each man and woman present. . . . Amen, amen, amen.”2 Delgado’s presence on Capitol Hill, albeit brief, raised more questions than answers. Those who lobbied for a close partnership between the Republican Party and the country’s eighteen million Latino Protestants might have seen Delgado as a natural ally and a confirmation that Latino Pentecostal megachurches shared their red-state ideology. After all, Latino Pentecostal megachurches shared their social conservatism (particularly antiabortion and anti-homosexuality) and had seen Republicanism in the Latino population grow from 21 to 44 percent from 1996 to 2004.3 Yet another Latino Pentecostal megachurch celebrity, Reverend Wilfredo de Jesús, had helped Barack Obama sweep Latino voters by trumpeting the Christian righteousness and justice of blue-state politics in his role as the national Latino Protestant adviser for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.4 From Brazil to Nigeria to Australia, Pentecostal megachurches had evolved into political fixtures with strong allegiances, but in the United States the loyalties of its supersized churches were still in flux. The intermittent pro-immigration advocacy of both parties kept Latino voters guessing about who would represent their interests, and Pentecostalism itself was a diverse tradition with political impulses that were often at cross-purposes.5 Their churches did not always articulate a single role for government; in Delgado’s case, supernatural promises of ready health and wealth needed God, not Washington, to solve their troubles. On the whole, Latino Pentecostal megachurches defied easy categories—purely supernatural or gradualist, Republican or Democratic, prosperity gospel or social gospel—in how they worked toward social transformation. This chapter attempts to characterize the political imagination of this relatively new arrival: the Latino megachurch. It follows the rise of these congregations across the country over the last two decades as they offered religious frameworks for the structural barriers facing believers.

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In 2015, thirty-four Latino Protestant churches scattered across the country had swelled to more than two thousand members, the overwhelming majority of which proclaimed a Pentecostal faith.6 Roughly a quarter of America’s fifty-three million Latinos were Protestant, and two-thirds of those Latino Protestants claimed to be Pentecostal.7 But Pentecostalism’s significant impact on Latinos was difficult to capture in a single snapshot. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, although only 8 percent of all Hispanic Christians claimed a Pentecostal denomination as their own, a majority of all Catholic and Protestant Hispanics identified as Charismatic, Pentecostal, or “born again” (compared with only one in ten non-Latinos). Some 54 percent of Hispanic Catholics and 57 percent of Hispanic Protestants identified as ­either Charismatic or Pentecostal. Once a fledgling presence among an overwhelmingly Catholic population, people who testified to a charismatic faith—electrified by talk of healing, miracles, spiritual gifts, holy tongues, and blessings—have grown into a significant religious and political constituency with towering churches that often doubled as campaign stops.8 Situated in heavily populated Hispanic metropolitan areas in Texas, California, and Florida, with a smattering in hubs such as Chicago and Phoenix, Latino megachurches served as gateways to coveted constituencies. With 65 percent of the Latino Protestant electorate, Latino Pentecostalism, broadly defined, was slowly winning both public recognition and significant numbers as a formidable faith community. The strength of the Latino mega­ church, in particular, was significant. As the largest churches drawn from the country’s largest ethnic minority, supersized Latino congregations earned a public voice that resonated far beyond their church rosters. Their pastors stood at the control panel of vast television, radio, and Internet media production able to pique interest and sustain loyalties. Their megachurches were fast becoming institutions with the size and reach of small denominations.9 Despite Pentecostalism’s reputation as a reluctant reformer of social structures, these megachurches possessed an expansive vision of social uplift.10 It came in many forms, old and young, denominational and nondenominational, English and Spanish dominant, and from apolitical and White House regulars. This chapter sketches three common frameworks

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for interpreting social mobility that emerged from Latino Pentecostal megachurches: a) compassionate service, b) apocalyptic justice, and c) spiritual favor.11 Though these frameworks did not always accompany formal civic engagement, it would be a mistake not to see these megachurches as political in nature.12 Each offered a different theological lever, a mechanism for how to move God and man to crack open a more just future, and an alternative social reality through which Pentecostals imagined their own agency in the creation of a fair society.

Compassionate Service Templo Calvario was one of the country’s largest Latino megachurches, with its vast congregation of eleven thousand, but also one of the oldest, with a rich legacy of social engagement. Latino Pentecostals could trace their heritage back to the famous 1906 Azusa Street revival when a handful of Mexican Americans testified to this multilingual promise of holy tongues in Spanish and took the message to towns and cities scattered across the U.S.–Mexican borderlands.13 In 1926, Templo Calvario was founded by Reverend Francisco Nieblas, one of Pentecostalism’s many pioneer Mexican evangelists who laid the groundwork for missions in California and Texas and throughout the Southwest. It was one of numerous congregations begun during the first large-scale migration of Mexicans to the United States, made up of agricultural workers and gathered refugees of the Mexican Revolution. Over the years, the small church grafted its mission to the needs of displaced people such as the laborers housed in Santa Ana’s barrios during the midcentury Bracero program, the soldiers stationed in the nearby army base, and the steady stream of immigrant families looking for a spiritual home. Nationwide, Latino Pentecostals were taking similar action in response to successive crises facing Hispanic America, from protests of the Great Depression’s forced repatriation of Mexican immigrants to the creation of refugee centers in the 1960s in Florida in the wake of the Cuban Revolution.14 Latino Pentecostals emerged onto the national scene in the 1960s and 1970s as prophets of inner-city renewal in major metropolitan Latino centers such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami.15

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Templo Calvario’s senior pastor Daniel de León joined leaders such as Sonny Arguinzoni (founder of Victory Outreach International) and Nicky Cruz (made famous by actor Erik Estrada’s performance in The Cross in the Switchblade as the gang-leader-turned-evangelist) in challenging Pentecostals to rebuild communities destroyed by violence and poverty.16 This Assemblies of God congregation in Santa Ana, California, ran a series of weekly worship and social services without fanfare. Seated in what was fast becoming the most populous Hispanic county in the country, Templo Calvario grew into a small evangelistic empire with a Bible school, dozens of successful church plants in nearby cities and Mexico, and its own 1,500-seat facility opened with great fanfare with a keynote from Billy Graham himself.17 Armed with the motto Soy benedicido para benedecir (“I am blessed to bless”), its hundreds of weekly volunteers ­mobilized to provide services for the 5.7 million Hispanic inhabitants of a city dubbed the hardest place to survive in America.18 Templo Calvario joined a global Pentecostal trend away from the sectarian and stand-alone quality of historic Pentecostal aid efforts and toward what sociologists Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori dubbed “progressive Pentecostalism.”19 This service-driven orientation typically distinguished itself by holistic and lay-oriented ministries that undertook a wide range of social programs and often included partnerships with other government and ecumenical organizations. Templo Calvario offered copious social services to many of the city’s Mexican-born immigrants, desperate to make ends meet with little education and manufacturing jobs that could not always pay the high cost of living. In 1985 the church opened Obras de Amor (Works of Love,) a food bank that partnered with like-minded organizations to deliver, by the first decade of the twentieth century, almost $11 million in goods to nine hundred thousand people every year.20 By the early 1990s, Pentecostals had transformed their grassroots credibility into budding political opportunities. Faith-based political organizations such as the National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries, Latino Pastoral Action Center, Esperanza, and the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders were giving Latino Pentecostals a voice in Washington, an ecumenical platform, and the ear of every presidential hopeful.21 Templo Calvario’s De León led as if oblivious to the

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celebrity he earned as the only Hispanic host of the popular Christian television show The 700 Club and a man with rising political capital. De León would later become a frequent adviser to President George W. Bush while his brother, Lee, ran the Templo Calvario Community Development Corporation with a generous grant in 2002 from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as part of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” campaign platform. The development arm of the church became a seedbed of social services with its fourpronged approach to community transformation—food, education, ­out­­reach, and employment—with services ranging from senior living facilities to affordable housing, job creation, youth programming, and community partnerships.22 Latino Pentecostal megachurches stood as shining examples of congregational care. This service-driven Pentecostalism kept the high-flying optimism characteristic of their faith but subdued talk of a supernatural secret or mechanism to ensure a guarantee. In fact, creating a thick social safety net for parishioners would be slow, difficult work. With so few church members living with any surplus, these megachurches spoke of economic uplift as if it were another miracle of loaves and fishes, a ­multiplication of almost nothing into more than enough. Historian and missionary Donald McGavran noted the church’s ability to improve the lot of the very poor simply by offering them a community of support (resulting in job leads, emotional connection, and accountability) and by enforcing strict moral codes by banning, for example, expensive vices (smoking, drinking, etc.) that would drain a family’s resources. He dubbed these effects “redemption and lift.”23 Pastor de León went further to suggest that the character developed from poverty was key to his church’s commitment to social uplift. Middle-class Christians, he said wryly, wanted to donate money but balked at the menial labor it required to staff these operations. “It’s the poor helping the poor,” he said.24 Mobilizing both laypeople and leaders for action fast became the hallmark of this stream of Pentecostalism. By the 2000s, service-driven megachurches were key players in consolidating a national network of Latino churches, faith-based organizations, and advocacy groups pressing for civil rights. In 2006 the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference emerged as the powerful Latino counterpart to the National

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Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Christian Leadership ­Conference with a young, energetic Assemblies of God pastor, Samuel Rodríguez, at the helm representing seventy-five denominations and more than twenty-three thousand Latino churches. De Jesús, the organization’s vice president of social justice, also led his own megachurch, the eleven-thousand-member New Life Covenant Church in Chicago, the largest church in the Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism’s largest (and once lily-white) denomination.25 He attracted national attention as a tireless stumper for Barack Obama in 2008, a forceful advocate for immigration reform, and a megachurch reformer of inner-city social assistance while even tossing his own hat in the ring by running for mayor of Chicago. “We need to penetrate the political structure and create enough discomfort so community leaders are willing to change,” he argued, pointing out that any church that does not at least familiarize itself with the local school and government bureaucracy will wither away.26 Service-driven Pentecostal megachurches brought fresh energy and purpose to a growing constituency. They were more likely to be ecu­ menically minded, older congregations identified with Pentecostal denominations with a high percentage of recent immigrants. Perhaps as a result of their long local histories, they seemed to accept social and political reform as a journey of small steps. Restoration Church of Los ­Angeles, one of the ten largest Latino megachurches, regularly marched around the Federal Building, holding American flags and signs that read “Praying and Working for Immigration Reform” and pausing to preach, pray, and answer questions from the television crews assembled.27 These megachurches regularly prayed for Holy Spirit come down and miracles to be brought forth, but in the meantime they agitated in the public sphere like those who, perhaps, suspected that Jesus might tarry a little longer before setting the world aright.

Hazme Justicia (Give Me Justice) Alberto Delgado and his wife Mariam’s popular television show always began on a relentlessly cheerful note with video montages of them ­waving, hugging their parishioners, sipping espressos, and walking the beach hand in hand, and Alberto hammering out a drum solo with the

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infectious rhythms of his own salsa band.28 The Cuban-born pastor of a six-thousand-member congregation cut a rather jolly figure, his round belly and heavy gold jewelry shaking every time he clapped his hands together and laughed. But his preaching often struck much darker notes. The Christian life was stalked by the devil, a thief and a liar who robbed people of their health, money, marriages, job security, and children living free from drugs and gangs. In his 2008 book, Hazme Justicia (Give Me Justice), Delgado attempted to strip believers of generations of false teachings that engendered complacency and tolerance of Satan’s schemes. It was a welcome message. The Miami metropolitan area had been among the hardest hit by the recession, leaving his church members to stare down ballooning mortgages with doubling unemployment rates and dwindling health coverage. Delgado’s apocalyptic urgency counseled worried listeners to look more closely at a scripture studded with secret spiritual laws tucked into cosmic numbers and accounts of all-­conquering personal faith. “The time is short,” he warned. The Antichrist was at the door, but, in the meantime, it was time for the faithful to be liberated and compensated by God, the Just Judge.29 It was a popular and heavily supernatural message of recompense preached by celebrities such as Guillermo and Ana Maldonado of the 13,000-member El Rey Jesús (King Jesus Ministry), Ruddy and Maria Gracia’s 7,000-member Segadores de Vida (Harvesters of Life), and Victor and Eva Higueros’s 2,500-member Ministerios Bethania USA ­(Bethany Ministries USA). All considered themselves pastors, prophets, and even apostles who claimed to reach millions through their various television programs, ministerial networks, and publications.30 They were immigrant missionaries, Christians from former mission fields whose attempts to reconvert the West formed yet another instance of the “reverse missionary effect.”31 In this case, pastors nurtured in the hard prosperity of Latin American Pentecostalism migrated to the United States and Canada with a mission to evangelize Spanish-speaking America. Some of these efforts were well planned and well funded, such as the vast Brazilian church-planting network of a single denomination, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.32 As the fourth-largest Spanish-speaking population in the Americas, the United States enticed hundreds of missionaries and thousands of converts to join sprawling Latin American–based churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Brazil),

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Apostolic Church of the Faith in Jesus Christ (Mexico), and El Shaddai (Guatemala). Typically founded in the 1990s, these churches evolved into mature congregations split between an aging immigrant population and a new generation with a patchwork of Spanish and English services and a host of supporting ministries that provided churchgoers with the familiar sounds of home with a spiritual pragmatism characteristic of a newer, American dream.33 Their pastors were deeply embedded in Pentecostal networks that, by the 2000s, crisscrossed easily between Latin American and American churches, revivals, conferences, periodicals, radio, television, and social media platforms.34 Across the country, Latino megachurches offered apocalyptic rewards redeemable before kingdom come. In the not-too-distant future, they preached, spiritual forces would dissolve the burdens of inequality, from debt and joblessness to family separation and undocumented immigration. Pentecostalism has always made room for the sharp-tongued prophet and apocalyptic glimpses into the unseen future. Early Pentecostals prayed for signs and wonders, unknown tongues and holy dances; they had seen devils and angels and worried about the Antichrist in the rise and fall of empires; but they would not have thought to pray for anything like Delgado’s plea for justice. At worst, the government and its slow-grinding political gears were the stuff of worldly distraction. At best, argues historian Grant Wacker, news from Washington came alive only as biblical referents to a larger cosmic drama set in motion from the dawn of time.35 References to “laws” and “rights” enriched a purely spiritual vocabulary predicated on defining the character of salvation and the certainty that signs and wonders would follow; the famous healing evangelist of the 1920s, F. F. Bosworth, had popularized a set of divine laws for healing that remained a Pentecostal staple for understanding when and how God unleashed miracles.36 But there was little sense that anything like justice would visit the righteous. The promise of heaven was the sweet marrow of faith. Apocalyptic Latino megachurches placed an uncommon emphasis on the rhetoric of justice.37 By contrast, apocalypticism in white prosperity circles tended to follow the classic formulations of the law of faith set out by Delgado’s mentor, Kenneth Hagin. Hagin famously parsed Pentecostal theology as governed by the logic of legal rights and privi-

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leges, but this language conjured up images of natural law rather than distributive justice. Hagin taught that “everything the Bible says is ours, legally. The Bible is a legal document.”38 Churches like Delgado’s concurred but let the word justice outshine prosperity as the full-orbed reward of the Christian life. The law of faith became the end run around every woe plaguing daily life, from debt and underemployment to lagging immigration reform. Hard prosperity had a cosmic solution for the woes of the world. God alone would take grand measures, unlocking the world’s wealth with End Times financial transfers from the wicked to the wise. The accumulated wealth of corporations, financiers, and CEOs would be redistributed to those who believed. For several generations of churchgoers who could remember all they had left behind—family, homes, jobs, ­friendships—this theology specifically redressed the often humiliating acts of rebuilding careers, reputations, and relationships in an unfamiliar urban maze. Nothing was lost in a spiritual world where God laid aside treasures for future possession. Pastor Rafael Cruz, a hard prosperity preacher, conservative stumper, and the father of Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, made recent headlines with his similar claims at a Texas megachurch with the added caveat that believers should take dominion over the marketplace in the meantime.39 Justice began with dollars and cents. In reducing the totality of economic obstacles to spiritual sources, Pentecostals frequently earned a reputation for being too binary, un­ realistic, and insular to negotiate the complex subtleties of political solutions. Why wage spiritual war against the pitfalls of late capitalism, particularly the erosion of social services, welfare, and living wages, when God would right past wrongs? As the anthropologist Kevin O’Neill has shown, an apocalyptic worldview can be strangely politically e­ nergizing— the Guatemalan Pentecostals in his study prayed, testified, sang, and ­believed as if every spiritual act waged war against Satan for the good of the nation.40 The largest Latino megachurch in the country, Miami’s King Jesus Ministry, harnessed both spiritual and political activism. Its mammoth sanctuary was a frequent stop for political candidates running for office in southern Florida, but also the staging grounds for cosmic efforts to lobby a higher power. At a 2012 service, Senior Pastor Guil­ lermo Maldonado invited two political candidates onstage to introduce

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them to the congregation and then encouraged his parishioners to join him in a two-week fast and pray about the upcoming elections. Their first act would be to join him at a 5:00 a.m. prayer service come Monday morning.41 This was the heavenly and earthly citizenship of Latino Pentecostalism.42 Maldonado and his thousands of followers prayed with the fervor of lonely prophets and then shook hands with such Republican powerhouses as Governors Rick Scott and Jeb Bush on the way to the parking lot. These twin messages of political and spiritual agency, here and in the last days, simultaneously softened condemnation of broken social structures and spurred churchgoers to wage war against complacency. The prosperity gospel spiritualized economic inequality that legitimated neoliberal policies that absolved the government from policing in­ equalities and allowed churches to mop up behind them.43 Throughout the government shutdown of 2013, for instance, televangelist and megachurch pastor Alberto Delgado’s daily tweets, devotionals, and Facebook messages remained tirelessly upbeat: “A champion gets up even when he has no strength. Don’t give up! If God is with you, who can be against you?”44 It was, in a sense, the same message he gave politicians in the gloomy economic frost of the recession. Believers understood that the odds were stacked against them and yet were encouraged to be savvy negotiators nonetheless. The church’s wide assortment of social services tilted toward individualist solutions such as school supplies for children and entrepreneurial resources for small business owners, but it also encouraged electoral savvy by featuring a rotating door of politicians in and out of the pulpit. Their apocalyptic justice reimagined present pain in light of future hope. After all, he preached as one who had flipped to the back of the cosmic storybook and assured his nervous listeners that everything would be made right in the end.

Do Yourself a Favor Pastor Obed Martinez was best known for preaching on the topic of influence, those soft connections and secret passageways that allow people to escape the confines of their own social spheres and unlock once-

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blocked gates. Having already built his own church to 2,500 members, Martinez marketed himself as an expert on the subject of how to get influence, how to keep it, and how to get more. So it is little wonder that he loved to tell the Old Testament story of Joseph. The familiar story begins with the handsome and faithful young Joseph whose brothers despise him for securing his father’s best love, a reality symbolized by their father’s gift to him of a colorful coat. Martinez saw in the life of Joseph the many turns of undeserved misfortune and subsequent faithfulness that elevated Joseph (and by extension all believers) to ever-greater circles of power, but he returned again and again to the significance of that coat. Too beautiful to be dirtied, the coat kept him from joining his brothers in the field, scratching out their living by their sweat and strong backs. It kept Joseph in the clean comfort of his father’s shadow, a lesson that every Christian should remember. Martinez spoke to them as if they had been fitted with the same heavy cloth, wrapped in special good fortune, and set aside for soft-palmed purposes. Stay in the presence of your Father, advised Martinez, “so that the Father can work everything out for you.” Martinez belonged to the new generation of Latino preachers determined to show believers how to get God on their side. His message represented one stream of the prosperity gospel that I call “soft prosperity,” soft not simply because it was endlessly optimistic and light on condemnation, but because it had settled on a gentler, more roundabout assessment of the relationship between faith and a God-given destiny of health and wealth. Martinez’s aptly named Destiny Church, unlike the heavy supernaturalism of ministries like Alberto Delgado’s, focused on uplifting audiences with gradualist and individualistic prescriptions of how to achieve God’s economic blessings. Miracles did not always swoop down with great fanfare, but seeped into the lives of the ruthlessly positive and hardworking. A soft-prosperity gospel, almost indistinguishable at times from simple optimism, could be heard from the pulpits of some of America’s largest Black, white, and Latino churches. Take, for example, the theological thrust of the popular sermon titles of Marcos Witt, the five-time Latin Grammy Award winner who pastored the Spanish congregation at the 43,500-member Lakewood Church: “Mas que Vencedores” (More Than Winners), “Lluvias de Bendiciones” (Showers of

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Blessing), “Nada Me Faltara” (I Will Not Lack for Anything).45 Audiences came to be taught how to slip into the divine flows that brought more—or perhaps just enough—into their lives. Latino soft-prosperity megachurches sprung up in the 2000s as latecomers to the national scene. In Black and white megachurches, soft prosperity had eclipsed hard prosperity over a decade earlier, when a series of scandals made the weeping and extortive televangelist the hated caricature of the movement as a whole. As the century came to a close, the sweeter and more therapeutic prosperity gospels of T. D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, and Joyce Meyer blanketed the country and pulled the movement into the evangelical (and largely white) mainstream. The coming-­ of-age of soft-prosperity Latino megachurches reflected the rise of second-­­generation and usually English-dominant churches emerging from deep pockets of Hispanic city dwellers across the American Sunbelt. Nestled in the California’s Coachella Valley, Destiny Church—like Cornerstone Church, River Church, and the Church at South Las Vegas, each bursting with several thousand attendees apiece—grew to maturity in West Coast Latino urban hubs. In Destiny Church’s Riverside County, for example, the area had grown over the last twenty years as home to the country’s eighth-largest Hispanic population with a 50 percent share of the total population, making it one of the most desirable locations in the nation for a Latino megachurch to find solid footing. Demographically speaking, Pastor Martinez was just the man to attract a crowd. In an area where the median age of the Latino community hovered at eighteen, Martinez wore the shabby-chic uniform of a youthful, trendier Pentecostalism—a trademark fitted blazer, hipster glasses, skinny jeans, and shaved head (but with a five o’clock shadow)—friendly to a generation of millennials. Martinez, for example, admitted that though he had grown up in an immigrant Spanish Pentecostal church, he didn’t speak a lick of Spanish; his congregation likewise sang, prayed, and testified in the unaccented English of the second and third generations. Pastor Martinez’s best friend, megachurch celebrity Sergio de la Mora, admitted that he had to relearn Spanish in order to respond to ­requests for a Spanish-language ministry at his four-thousand-member Cornerstone Church.46 These new English-speaking and multicultural megachurches found that believers had not gone looking for a church

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like their parents. They were American-born with a fading immigrant memory. The assembly did not advertise its Latino constituency or carry the torch for an immigrant past. Destiny Church was, to borrow a slogan from another like-minded congregation, “Not Your Abuela’s Church.”47 Soft prosperity represented an assimilative and individualistic strain in Latino Pentecostalism. Destiny Church TV, as the name suggests, tapped into a vast local market with an appetite for cultural reach and a savvy leader to show them how to fit in to American culture. Most of the area’s native-born Latinos belonged to a restless lower middle class, fitted with sales and office support jobs. They inhabited the doughy economic middle of native-born Latinos in Riverside between a thick upper middle class of management and professional types and an impoverished lower class with nearly double the nation’s unemployment rate.48 Their jobs often depended on the interpersonal virtues and a tough-­mindedness that Martinez preached in sermons like “Empowered to Flourish” and “Let’s Go for It.” In this way, soft prosperity did not simply offer people theological tools. In an increasingly privatized neoliberal state that ­compelled its citizens to be self-made and self-sustaining, soft prosperity rehearsed the need for spiritual positivity in a culture drifting t­oward happiness as a “work ethic.”49 On the whole, Destiny Church seemed to draw from that aspirational majority with its upwardly mobile message of financial you-can-do-it and an acculturative mentality that assured members that they were being carried forward by a sanctified American popular culture. From the flashing lights and pulsing drumbeats of the worship music to the church’s social media hubs on Vimeo, Twitter, and Facebook, congregations were assured that their church breathed American air. Its heavy traffic in other, similar Latino megachurches for conferences and special events was the only public hint that these churches are dominated by Hispanics and, in fact, often obscured by claims to be multicultural. Certainly, as their leaders could always be seen on Instagram smiling beside such church celebrities as Osteen and Brian Houston, churchgoers were reassured that they shared the comfortable familiarity of the English mainstream. These were implicit a­ dvertisements of these preachers’ ability to traffic in broader Anglo-­dominated circles. Not that these preachers had achieved widespread recognition on the national scene. The 2013 catalogue for Casa Creacíon, one of the largest

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Spanish-language religious publishers, might feature their faces in the back pages after a torrent of Spanish translations of bestselling authors such as Meyers. But, seen from another angle, this supporting role was a show of cultural strength. Latino preachers of soft prosperity in particular escaped the racial silos of “Hispanic ministry,” traveling in the wider cultural spheres that Pastor Martinez so effectively marketed as “influence.” Latino megachurches on the whole reflected the gradual rise to middle class and a theology that offered a rich conceptual framework for its needs and wants. The instinctive conservatism of a first-generation immigrant church—hesitant about the lures of American culture and its endless temptations—faded as churches like Destiny answered the desires of the young, lifting the ban on majority culture by consecrating trendy clothes, Top 40-style music, and the middle-class bohemia of ­Starbucks culture inside church walls. But these megachurches’ adoption of cultural trends also communicated a strong positive message about Latino believers’ ability to exercise power in an Anglophone world. On the whole, these churches tended to be silent about any formal engagement with politics, from presidential elections and voter registration to immigration reform. Instead, they advocated spiritual virtues and practices as universal strategies to solve their own problems inside a capitalist system with a thinning social safety net and a civil religion marked by mythic bootstrappers and comeback kids.50 Pastor Martinez preached with the hope that every believer might be a Joseph, tucked into his Father’s arm and enjoying his special favor. Favor was a term that prosperity believers used to describe a confluence of spiritual benefits that true Christians can expect from God. It is that unexpected surplus of good fortune that outsiders might simply call “luck” but insiders saw as the rewards of faith. “God has already given you favor as long as you’re in the presence of God,” Martinez assured them. “That’s why He says:” You stay in my presence, I’ll fight your battles for you. You stay in my presence, I’ll give you promotion in your job. You stay in my presence, I’ll heal your family. You stay in my presence, I’ll save your children.

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Martinez’s words went out into an audience of crisp polo shirts and artificially faded jeans, manicured nails and faux windblown hair. Martinez preached to their desires with a thick playbook of self-improvement, ideas he also boiled down into development seminars for pastors with topics ranging from improving one’s prayer life to diet and exercise tips to developing a personal brand. It was an urban and status-hungry generation not far removed from family or ancestors who, like Joseph’s brothers, did have to endure hard labor—migrant workers, agricultural field hands, or factory operatives. But if this second generation wanted to succeed like Joseph, it would have to do the hard work of following God’s plan to “do yourself a favor.”

Latino Megachurches and the Possibility of Political Engagement Latino Pentecostal megachurches represented not only formidable ethnic enclaves but also significant platforms for broader engagement with American culture. Buoyed by streams of new immigrants and the strength of a robust generation of native-born, English-speaking sons and daughters, these megachurches popped up across the South, the Sunbelt, and in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas with a distinctively social mandate. As we have seen, there was always a dual diagnosis at work—a theological account of human capability and a spiritual reckoning with the wider world that must be navigated. In a compassionate service model, churches acknowledged the difficult odds stacked against believers but combined talk of spiritual assistance with a heavy pragmatism and a cooperative stance toward other governmental and nongovernmental social service providers. An apocalyptic justice model set the church in opposition to the government and financial markets, depicted in overwhelmingly otherworldly terms as embroiled in wars between darkness and light. And a spiritual favor approach softened the indictment of American culture by portraying the marketplace as a pliable barrier in an inevitable climb to economic comfort. Each reimagined the gospel as offering a special theological lever to move God to act on behalf of believers, but all shared an exceedingly high anthropology, a buoyant confidence that Pentecostals were powerful actors who moved God and people to create a more just society.

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The remarkable diversity internal to Latino Pentecostal megachurches also hints at some clues into four possible political trajectories of this growing constituency. First, there is evidence to suggest that Latino Pentecostals will become more deeply embedded in the Republicanism of the American evangelical landscape. Mexican American Jacob Aranza earned his evangelical reputation in the 1980s for his exposé of “backwards masking,” subliminal Satanic messages hidden in rock-androll tunes when played backwards, and went on to become a successful megachurch pastor of the 4,600-member Our Savior’s Church of Lafayette, Louisiana.51 Aranza was a Republican favorite. Preaching at Governor Bobby Jindal’s 2015 prayer rally, Aranza proudly introduced three politicians, including Senator Jonathan Perry, as men who claimed to hear God’s call to run for office while members at his church.52 The California-­based Calvary Chapel denomination also shows signs of growth among Latino members with Republican leanings. Latino celebrities who boldly proclaimed the Republican platform as coming “closest to the biblical worldview” led a large number of their most successful megachurches and ministries.53 But, secondly, these closer ties to the American evangelical mainstream also led some away from politics. The growth of soft prosperity in second-generation Latino megachurches, for instance, fostered little political engagement as it buttressed parishioners’ confidence in their own ability to navigate earthly challenges by heavenly means. Third, issues around immigration could also lead churches away from politics. As megachurches were constantly receiving new immigrants, their investment teetered between American political engagement and an exilic mindset. These Latino-oriented churches were the northern nodes of a vast associative web of churches, ministries, Bible schools, and conferences, as well as television, internet, and radio broadcasts of like-minded Pentecostals spread widely across South and Central America. In some cases, the energy of these churches tilted south. Vino Nuevos (New Wine Church), for example, was founded in 2001 by a group of missionaries sent across the thin line separating Juarez, Mexico, from its American metropolitan counterpart El Paso, Texas, and grew into a 2,500-member congregation almost exclusively focused on international aid.54 But, lastly, immigration questions more frequently pressed megachurches into the political fray. They became organizational headquarters during neighborhood food drives and stomping grounds for

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i­ncumbent elected officials and political hopefuls alike. Their pastors were invited to the White House, and reporters were beginning to write about their growing numbers. Politically ambivalent, swayed (most often) left or right depending on the issue and the election, Latino Pentecostals represented a coveted ally in a country that had already branded most of its faith communities.55 In this range of approaches we see that Latino megachurches held together communities that could not afford to separate spiritual from secular solace. Unlike their Black and white counterparts, they were closely tied to an immigrant identity and set in constant motion by an endless stream of newcomers, a rising majority of second-generation youth, and an aging first-generation core. They served not only citizens but also undocumented populations whose lives were criminalized and whose needs were primarily economic. Popular Latino Pentecostalism celebrated the aspirations of believers who wanted more in the face of less and baptized dreams that were equal parts American and theological. Perhaps these churches already understood what a 2013 poll uncovered citing Hispanics as leading the way in hope in the American Dream.56 Only a quarter responded that it meant great wealth. The rest simply wanted to own a home, go to college, surpass their parents, and be rewarded for hard work. The nation’s largest Hispanic churches seemed to heartily agree, urging people to look up and let God show them how.

Notes 1.  “Television,” Alberto Delgado official website, accessed August 11, 2015, https://aomiami.org/medios-de-comunicacion/#tv. 2. “Opening Prayer for U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln Diaz-­ Balart and Pastor Alberto Delgado,” July 13, 2009, http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=Ly1N0nFVGEw. 3.  Gastón Espinosa, “Can Obama Win the Latino Protestant Vote?,” Religion & Politics, John G. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics, October 15, 2012, http://religionandpolitics.org/2012/10/15/will-obama-win-the-latino -protestant-vote/. 4. Gregory Smith, “Palin V.P. Nomination Puts Pentecostalism in the Spotlight,” Pew Research Center Religion & Public Life Project, September 12, 2008, http://www.pewforum.org/2008/09/12/palin-vp-nomination-puts-pente costalism-in-the-spotlight/.

308  Kate Bowler 5.  See, for instance, R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin ­America’s New Religious Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael Dodson, “Pentecostals, Politics, and Public Space in Latin America,” in Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America, ed. Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-­ Gambino (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 25–40; Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Donald E. Miller, Kimon H. Sargeant, and Richard Flory, eds., Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 6.  Author’s selection of megachurches drawn from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research’s Database of Megachurches in the U.S., http://hirr.hart sem.edu/megachurch/database.html. 7.  See Luis Lugo et al., “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, October 5, 2006, https://www .pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/; and Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, “Hispanic Churches in American Public Life: Summary of Findings,” Interim Reports 2003, no. 2 (March 2003). Gastón Espinosa’s groundbreaking Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) offers the most complete portrait of this American faith community; see p. 4. 8.  Gastón Espinosa, “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity,” Pneuma 26, no. 2 (2004): 262–92. 9.  For an excellent analysis of the significance of size in American de­ nominationalism, see Mark Chaves, “All Creatures Great and Small: Megachurches in Context,” Review of Religious Research 47, no. 4 (2006): 329–46. For more on the place of megachurches and their expansive media in American Christianity, see Kate Bowler and Wen Reagan, “Bigger, Better, Louder: The Prosperity Gospel’s Impact on Contemporary Christian Worship,” Religion and American Culture 24, no. 2 (2014): 186–230, doi:10.1525/rac.2014.24.2.186. 10.  Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4–5. An edited collection by Michael Wilkinson and Steven M. Studebaker helpfully extended this analysis of “progressive Pentecostalism” to a North American context; see Michael Wilkinson and Steven M. Studebaker, eds., A Liberating Spirit: Pentecostals and Social Action in North America (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010). 11.  The category of “compassionate justice” includes the following Latino megachurches: New Life Covenant Ministries, Chicago, IL; Templo Calvario, Santa Ana, CA; Iglesia El Calvario, Orlando, FL; La Iglesia en el Camino, Van Nuys, CA; Cristo Mi Redentor, West Palm Beach, FL. The category of “apoca-

Looking Up  309 lyptic justice” includes King Jesus International Ministry, Miami, FL; Iglesia Christiana Segadores De Vida, Hollywood, CA; Iglesia de Restauracion Inc., Los Angeles, CA; Ministerios Llamada Fina, Downey, CA; Ministerios Bathania USA, Carrolton, TX; Iglesia Christiana Misericordia, Loredo, TX; and Alpha and Omega Church, Miami, FL. The category of “spiritual favor” includes Destiny Church, Indio, CA; Cornerstone Church, San Diego, CA; Abundant Living Family Church, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; Church at South Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV; and River Church, Anaheim, CA. 12.  For a convincing account of Pentecostalism as inculcating democratic virtues, see Luke Bretherton, “Pentecostalism and Political Witness: Framing Pentecostal Responses to Capitalism and Democracy,” International Journal of Public Theology (forthcoming). For a helpful theological typology of the Pentecostal political engagement in global Pentecostalism, see Amos Yong, In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 3–38. 13.  Daniel Ramirez, “Borderlands Praxis: The Immigrant Experience in Latino Pentecostal Churches,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 3 (1999): 573–96. 14.  See Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals, 326–42. 15. Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals, 342. See also Manuel Ortiz, The Hispanic Challenge: Opportunities Confronting the Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 1994), especially chapter 5. For a socio-theological analysis of urban Latino Pentecostalism, see Eldin Villafañe, The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993). 16.  Daniel de León, La Escalera del Éxito (Miami: Caribe/Betania, 2001). 17.  Templo Calvario, “Our History,” accessed February 15, 2021, http:// templocalvarioenglish.com/about-us/our-history/. 18.  Pew Research Center, “Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA, Metropolitan Area, Table 1, Characteristics of the Population, by Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity: 2011,” Hispanic Trends, https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2013/08/29 /mapping-the-latino-population-by-state-county-and-city/; Mike Anton and Jennifer Mena, “The Hard Life—Santa Ana Style,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2004. 19.  Pentecostals and Charismatics have been at the forefront of grassroots Christian efforts to address social needs around the world. However, as Donald Miller notes, “Very few Pentecostal churches address social problems at a political or structural level. Instead, they tend to address individual human needs” (Donald Miller, “Pentecostalism as a Global Phenomenon,” in Spirit and Power, ed. Miller, Sergeant, and Flory, 14). For an overview of such forms of engagement worldwide, see Miller and Tetsunao, Global Pentecostalism. 20.  “About Us | TCCDC,” Templo Calvario Community Development, accessed August 4, 2015, https://www.tccdc.org/.

310  Kate Bowler 21.  Esperanza was founded in 1987, the Latino Pastoral Action Center in 1992, the National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries in 1992 (before it merged in 2006 with the National Hispanic Leadership Christian Conference), and the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders in 1998, a little later than the others. 22.  “Revitalizing Communities: Are Faith-Based Organizations Getting the Federal Assistance They Need?,” Report from the Committee on Government Reform Q05 House of Representatives, 190th Congress, June 14, 2005, http:// www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg24085/html/CHRG-109hhrg24085 .htm; Templo Calvario, Community Development Corporation, accessed February 13, 2014, http://tccdc.org. 23. Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, rev. ed. (Grand ­Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980). 24.  “Something from Nothing,” in Drew Dyck, Jon Rising and Joel Kil­ patrick, “2007 Models in Innovation,” Ministry Today Magazine, February 28, 2007, http://ministrytodaymag.com/index.php/features/14742-2007-models-in -innovation; Daniel A. Rodriguez, A Future for the Latino Church: Models for Multi­lingual, Multigenerational Hispanic Congregations (Downers Grove, IL: ­InterVarsity Press, 2011), 121–23. 25.  National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, “Hispanic Minister, Wilfredo De Jesus, Emerges as Pastor of Assemblies of God Largest Congregation,” September 17, 2010, https://nhclc.org/blog/hispanic-minister-wilfredo -de-jesus-emerges-as-pastor-of-assemblies-of-god-largest-congregation. 26.  Wilfredo De Jesús, Amazing Faith: How to Make God Take Notice (Springfield, MO: Influence Resources, 2012), 56–57. 27.  Restauracion Los Angeles, “Homepage,” accessed February 15, 2014, http://restauracionlosangeles.com/. 28.  Alpha y Omega Church, accessed February 15, 2014, http://www.alpha -omega.org. 29.  Alberto Delgado, Hazme Justicia (n.p.: ADM Productions, 2008). 30.  Ministerios Bethania USA, “Senior Pastors,” accessed August 11, 2015, http://bethaniausa.com/pastors/. 31.  Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 204–209. 32.  See Espinosa, “Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity.” 33.  Pew Research, “Miami-Hialeah, FL, Metropolitan Area, Table 1, Characteristics of the Population, by Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity: 2011,” accessed August 11, 2015, http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/states/pdf/miami_11.pdf. 34. For a historical overview of the radio ministries directed to Latinos, see Janet Lynn Treviño de Elizarraraz, “Mass Media and Latino Churches,” in Los Evangélicos: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States, ed. Juan F. Martinez and Lindy Scott (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009).

Looking Up  311 35.  Matthew Sutton convincingly argues that Pentecostals and Fundamentalists were much more invested in global politics than often credited. I lean here on Grant Wacker’s view that while Pentecostals may have referenced the political sphere, they were much more reticent to engage it directly. See Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014); and Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 222. 36.  F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer (Old Tappan, NJ: F. H. Revell, 1973). 37.  Similarly, as Matthew Sutton has demonstrated, the language of justice also resonated with Black Pentecostals and Fundamentals in the early twentieth century (Sutton, American Apocalypse, 110). 38.  Kenneth E. Hagin, In Him (Tulsa, OK: Kenneth Hagin Ministries, 2006), 9. 39.  Rafael Cruz preaching at New Beginnings Church, August 26, 2012, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/353532639493285537/. 40. O’Neill, City of God, 95. 41.  Ed O’Keefe, “What Do a Miami Megachurch, a Sea Turtle and Roasted Pigs Have in Common?,” Washington Post, October 22, 2012, http://www .washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/wp/2012/10/22/5in5-what-do-a-miami -megachurch-a-sea-turtle-and-roasted-pigs-have-in-common/. 42.  As Luke Bretherton writes, these constituted “rival performances of what democratic citizenship entails” (Bretherton, “Pentecostalism and Political Witness”). 43.  As Donald Miller observed, “To date, Pentecostals seldom challenge the equity of the financial arrangements within global capitalism” (Miller, Progressive Pentecostalism, 183). 44.  Alberto Delgado, Twitter, October 15, 2013: “Un campeón se levanta aun cuando no tiene fuerzas. ¡No te des por vencido! Si Dios contigo, ¿quien contra ti?” 45.  For a list of Marcos Witt’s sermon titles, see Marcos Witt in the iTunes app. 46. Jessica Martinez, “Latino Ministries Led by Bilingual Leaders are ­Becoming Agents in the Hispanic Church Movement,” The Christian Post, September 8, 2013, http://www.christianpost.com/news/latino-ministries-led-by -bilingual-leaders-are-becoming-the-agents-in-the-hispanic-church-movet -103987. 47. Rodriguez, Future for the Latino Church, 98. 48.  Pew Research, “Hispanic Population in Select U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Hispanic Trends, 2011, accessed August 11, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org /hispanic/2013/08/29/mapping-the-latino-population-by-state-county-and-city/. 49.  Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Random House, 2010), 50.

312  Kate Bowler 50.  Gary Vaynerchuk, The Thank You Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 2011); Sam Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011); Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Picador, 2009). 51.  “Jacob & Michelle Aranza,” Our Savior’s Church, accessed August 4, 2015, https://oursaviorschurch.com/team-member/jacob-michelle-aranza/. 52.  Kyle Mantyla, “Bobby Jindal’s Oddly Political Non-Political Prayer Rally,” Right Wing Watch, January 26, 2015, https://www.rightwingwatch.org /post/bobby-jindals-oddly-political-non-political-prayer-rally/. 53.  “Why Vote?,” Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Online, accessed August 4, 2015, http://calvarycch.org/whyvote.php. See Calvary Chapel Chino Valley (http://calvaryccv.org/) and Calvary Chapel Montebello (https://www.ccmtb .com/ ) for examples of Latino-led Calvary Chapel megachurches. 54. Vino Nuevo El Paso, “Quienes Somos,” accessed August 11, 2015, https://www.vinonuevo.com/nuestra-historia. 55.  For the most sophisticated treatment of the deep political ambivalence and recent move toward Democratic identification on the part of Latinos in the 2008 election, see Gastón Espinosa, ed., Religion, Race, and the American Presidency (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 56.  “Hispanics and the American Dream,” Washington Post, January 30, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/hispanics-and-the-american-dream /2014/01/30/130cd492-8a0a-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_graphic.html.

CHAPTER 14

Progressive Politics and Religious Faith Ja m e s T. K l o p p e n b e r g ★

When the contributors to this volume gathered in 2014, at the Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis, the title of the conference, “Beyond the Culture Wars,” reflected the optimism of the moment. The reelection of Barack Obama, judged by many Americans the most ­progressive president since Lyndon Johnson, and the election of Pope Francis, widely hailed as the most progressive pope since John XXIII, suggested two possibilities. First, their success raised hopes on the left that conservatives’ stranglehold on social policy might be loosening. ­Second, the selection of these moderate reformers suggested that reconciliation might replace conflict in politics and religion. How different the world looks in the summer of 2020. Whatever hopes reform-minded Catholics had for Pope Francis, radical changes such as the end of celibacy for priests or the ordination of women seem as unlikely now as they did in the days before Vatican II. The gulf b ­ etween conservative Evangelical Christians and mainline ecumenical Protestants has widened and deepened. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency signaled not only the end of Obama’s policies but also his 313

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e­ fforts at conciliation. Perhaps not surprisingly, a man who first emerged from the banal depths of reality television by denying, without a shred of evidence, that Obama was born in the United States campaigned for election by demonizing all his opponents. Since his inauguration, Trump has ramped up his rhetoric so dramatically that he now describes large segments of the American people—and much of the world’s ­population— as criminals best locked up. Facing multiple crises, including a cascading death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedentedly swift economic collapse, and nationwide protests that exploded after police officers murdered unarmed African Americans, Trump poured gasoline on the fire. Lies numbering in the tens of thousands and overheated, ever-­ escalating denunciations of his critics have kept him in the spotlight and highlighted the contrast between his blustery showmanship and the unflappable cool of his predecessor. Obama repeatedly invoked the words and sentiments of earlier presidents who sought to heal a divided nation. He offered consolation to victims of mass shootings and called for the nation to unite around its highest ideals. Unlike Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address or Lincoln in his second, Trump spewed a steady stream of hatred. He offered only malice toward all who challenged his pretensions to autocracy and charity toward none but his shrinking band of loyalists. In this chapter I will examine the reasons why many political and religious progressives were hopeful in 2014, the reasons why those hopes have dimmed in the last six years, and the reasons why progressives in 2021 should not despair. I will focus on two sometimes-forgotten but persistent presences in American culture, the reformist politics of the moderate left and the progressive tradition in American Catholicism, two sources on which Obama drew. An article on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, March 23, 2014, must have surprised many readers. The headline announced “The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism.” The article detailed Obama’s experience as a community organizer in the Developing Communities Project sponsored and funded by the Roman Catholic Arch­ diocese of Chicago. As Obama himself has said many times, doing that work shifted his interests away from a career as a writer and toward law and politics. After Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983, he worked

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briefly for Business International Corporation, then for New York’s Public Interest Research Group, before he accepted a job working out of a cramped basement office in Holy Rosary Church on the far south side of Chicago. Harold Washington had recently been elected as the city’s first Black mayor, but that fact made little difference in the lives of the people Obama and his fellow organizers were trying to help.1 For community organizers, disillusionment and cynicism were occupational hazards. What kept Obama plugging away, he later reported, was the dedication of the people he got to know in the Catholic social services network. Looking to expand that network, he began contacting ministers in Chicago’s Black churches. That effort brought him to Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. There Obama observed Wright’s combination of Christian ethics and political activism, a hybrid with roots stretching back to the Black churches of the rural South and the Social Gospel of the urban North. Impressed by the depth of commitment he witnessed in the Catholics and Protestants who devoted their lives to working for Chicago’s dispossessed, Obama began to think about his own lack of community, the rootlessness of his own upbringing in Honolulu and J­ akarta. His anthropologist mother had valued the great books of multiple religious traditions. She had read with her children a range of texts including the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita. She described herself as “spiritual,” but she had no religious ­affiliation. Although she sent her son to two different Catholic schools while they lived in Indonesia, Obama recalled having had no religious experience himself ­growing up. As readers familiar with Dreams from My Father know, all that changed when Obama began attending Wright’s Trinity Church for his own reasons, reasons quite different from the strategic calculations that had led him to contact Wright in the first place. Initially Obama was ­intrigued by the blending of African, African American, and Christian cultural themes in the services at Trinity Church. One Sunday, though, he found himself drawn into a reverie that linked Wright’s congregation to the struggles of oppressed people stretching from wandering Israelites to enslaved Africans to the impoverished people he had gotten to know in Chicago. Obama wrote in Dreams that Wright’s sermon that day was a highly charged plea on behalf of what he called “the audacity of

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hope.” Not only did it move Obama to tears, it convinced him that he had found in Christianity a spiritual home of his own.2 He would remain, in his words, a Christian and a skeptic. That combination strikes many ­Americans—both believers and unbelievers—as unusual, perhaps even incoherent, and exploring it will be one of my goals in this chapter. Jeremiah Wright told David Remnick that Obama came to him not only looking for a social gospel but also for “a faith that doesn’t put other people’s faith down.” At Trinity Obama found a form of pluralism that resonated with his own respect for multiple religious traditions.3 That headline in the New York Times might have been surprising ­because most Americans today do not associate Catholicism with either the young Obama’s social activism or the mature Obama’s center-left politics. Most news stories in recent years, for very good reasons, have concentrated on the cultural conservatism of the Catholic Church, particularly on the official Catholic opposition to contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage, and on the hierarchy’s cover-up of the abomi­ nable child abuse scandal. During 2014, however, that focus began to shift, and the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the first pope from the southern hemisphere was clearly the reason why. One year after he was the surprise choice of the College of Cardinals, Pope Francis was everywhere. Time named him man of the year. The New Yorker devoted a long, detailed cover story to him. Notwithstanding the pope’s radical critique of capitalism, which right-wing American pundit Rush Limbaugh described as “pure Marxism,” the flagship magazine of global free enterprise, the Economist, published a profile of Francis arresting not only for its length but also for its respectful tone. Finally, the editors of Fortune magazine declared Francis number one in their ranking of the world’s fifty top leaders. By contrast, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, Barack Obama, just a year and a half after winning reelection as president, did not make the cut.4 So we gathered at the Danforth Center in 2014 to discuss the culture wars at a somewhat peculiar moment in American politics and popular culture. The pope, who has continued to excoriate the worship of money and the dictatorship of the market, was being widely celebrated for relinquishing the splendor of the papal residence and the luxury of limos for a simple guesthouse and a late-model Renault. The then-president of

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the United States, a moderate who enacted a very modest scheme of healthcare devised by the Heritage Foundation and first rolled out by Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, was denounced as a socialist, not only because of Obamacare but because he had the audacity to propose increasing the taxes of wealthy Americans and substantially raising the minimum wage. When I first proposed “Barack Obama and the Paradoxes of Progressive Christianity” as a title for my remarks at the conference, I had no idea just how deep those paradoxes would seem by late March of 2014. One progressive Christian, Pope Francis, was hot. Another progressive Christian, Barack Obama, had favorability ratings so low that many Democratic candidates asked him to stay away from their electoral campaigns. The editors of Fortune decided that, as a world leader, Obama ranked lower than a New York Yankee shortstop who played seventeen games the previous season and lower than the coach of the Johns Hopkins swim team. Of course leaving Obama off the Fortune list was a stunt, a way to generate some buzz around the editors’ annual celebration of billionaire CEOs and a few glamorous philanthropists. Yet there was more to it. I’ll return to that. The title of our volume, Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars, remains tantalizingly ambiguous. It might suggest that Americans have moved beyond the culture wars, so we should stop thinking within that tired framework. Or it might suggest the need to rethink the history of American politics and religion in the twentieth century so that our analysis can move beyond the culture wars, or perhaps that our scholarship might help our nation move beyond the culture wars. In this chapter I will argue instead not only that such conflicts are as old as Christianity, and certainly as old as European settlements in the New World, but also that our culture might possess the resources necessary to deal with them even if we cannot resolve them. I will begin with Pope Francis and the long-standing tensions among Catholics within and outside the United States. Then I will turn to Obama and his religious and political convictions. In my conclusion, I will engage the work of David Hollinger, the eminent historian who delivered the keynote address at the Danforth conference that preceded ours, a paper revised for publication in The Worlds of American Intellectual

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History. Hollinger presents an impressive array of evidence concerning churchgoing in the United States, which he interprets as an indication of a continuing decline of religious belief among Americans, particularly among well-educated Americans. Hollinger contends that the process of secularization, so clearly evident in northern Europe, is proceeding on this side of the Atlantic too, despite the fact that a large majority of Americans still claim to believe in God. The evidence of that decline is striking. The percentage of Americans who characterize themselves as atheists and agnostics remains low, at 4 percent and 5 percent respectively. The number unaffiliated with any religion, however, is growing, having risen from 12 percent to 17 percent in the last decade, according to polls conducted by the Pew Research Center. In this chapter I will suggest a way of thinking about that evidence that is different from seeing it as a sign of growing secularization.5 Several features of Pope Francis’s words and deeds merit attention in 2020. First, it is worth emphasizing that Francis has not yet shown much interest in altering church doctrine. Full disclosure: I am an active member of the parish where the Catholic reform group Voice of the Faithful was born in 2004. I belong to several groups of dissident Catholics who oppose the Church’s stance on issues of sexual morality and advocate allowing women to become priests and allowing all priests to marry—women as well as men, gay as well as straight. So I am hardly a disinterested observer. I share the disappointment of many progressive Catholics that Francis has not signaled any substantive changes in the directions toward which many American Catholics would like to see the church move. It is equally troubling that issues that matter deeply to so many conservative Catholics around the world, above all abortion and gay marriage, are deemed “nonnegotiable.” But I also share the satisfaction felt by many dissidents that this pope has quite explicitly and repeatedly recommended paying more attention to the problems of unbridled greed and persistent poverty than to the issues that concerned some of his predecessors and still obsess many Catholics, including those who have challenged the Affordable Care Act on the grounds of religious freedom, those who object to abortion under any circumstances, and those who oppose same-sex marriage. Francis’s decision to remove the reactionary Cardinal Raymond Burke, former archbishop of St. Louis, from his post in the influential Vatican Congre-

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gation of Bishops was one sign of that change. The pope’s denial that he is in a position to judge the lives of homosexual priests was another. His lengthy exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” or “The Joy of the Gospel” (2013), and his encyclical Laudato Si, or “Care for Our Common Home” (2015), are perhaps the most striking of all.6 We might consider these proclamations his contributions to the culture wars, which I contend show no sign of abating any time soon. Although many readers will be familiar with a few words from these documents widely noted when they appeared, I will quote some longer passages that give a better sense of their flavor. First, consider this ringing paragraph from chapter 1 of “Evangelii Gaudium”: The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spirit which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.7 That lament might seem familiar, even predictable, a refrain long intoned by Christians worried about the conflict between material goods and the Beatitudes. But consider just the section headings in chapter 2, entitled “Amid the Crisis of Communal Commitment,” which will give you a taste of the pope’s radical argument: No to an economy of exclusion [§53-54] No to the new idolatry of money [§55-56] No to a financial system which rules rather than serves [§57-58] No to the inequality which spawns violence [§59-60] In short, Francis rejected the legitimacy of just about everything taken for granted in the capitalist economies of the developed world for

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the last four decades. In the section on “the economy and the distribution of income” he wrote, The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies. At times, however, they seem to be a mere addendum imported from without in order to fill out a political discourse lacking in perspectives or plans for true and integral development. How many words prove irksome to this system! It is irksome when the question of ethics is raised, when global solidarity is invoked, when the distribution of goods is mentioned, when reference is made to protecting labour and defending the dignity of the powerless, when allusion is made to a God who demands a commitment to justice. [§203] Francis described the accelerating increase in inequality throughout the world as indefensible according to Christian principles, principles that should overrule the supposed laws of market economics. To make his case even more explicit, Francis continued, “We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth.” It requires “a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.” Attempts “to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded” are merely “a new poison” [§204]. Francis’s critique of economic injustice, which includes an explicit condemnation of the theory of “trickle-down economics,” is blunt. But it is just one theme in the exhortation, albeit the one that attracted the most attention in the American press. Francis also endorsed ecumenical outreach that extends beyond the most influential documents of Vatican II. Not only did Francis call for greater cooperation and mutual understanding among all Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who share, he points out, a common heritage, he extended the plea for dialogue to other religions and, perhaps even more surprisingly, to another community to which the Catholic Church has not always spoken generously, agnostics and atheists. He stressed “the importance of respect for religious freedom, viewed as a fundamental human right, which includes ‘the freedom

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to choose the religion which one judges to be true and to manifest one’s beliefs in public’” [§202, 203]. This “healthy pluralism,” Francis declared, “one which genuinely respects differences and values them as such, does not entail privatizing religions in an attempt to reduce them to the quiet obscurity of the ­individual’s conscience or to relegate them to the enclosed precincts of churches, synagogues or mosques.” In other words, there is no reason for Catholics or members of other religious traditions to keep silent on ­matters of public concern. Indeed, that is exactly what Francis was doing in his exhortation. It was not, however, the sort of intervention people expect these days from the head of the Catholic Church. Yet it was nothing new. The Catholic Church proclaimed its acceptance of religious pluralism in the mid-1960s, in Nostra Aetate (1965), the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, and Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the Declaration on Religious Freedom. Francis elaborated the twenty-first-century Church’s commitment to toleration in these words: “As believers, we also feel close to those who do not consider themselves part of any religious tradition, yet sincerely seek the truth, goodness and beauty which we believe have their highest expression and source in God. We consider them as precious allies in the commitment to defending human dignity, in building peaceful co­ existence between peoples and in protecting creation.” Finally, Francis pointedly embraced the ideas of a special encounter between “believers and non-believers,” who should be “able to engage in dialogue about ­fundamental issues of ethics, art and science, and about the search for transcendence” [§257]. “This too,” he concluded, “is a path to peace in our troubled world” [§204]. The thrust of the exhortation is unmistakable, and it constitutes an extension of the words of recent popes who reiterated the ecumenical message of Vatican II. For that reason progressive Catholics found it as invigorating as conservatives found it disturbing. Here I want to emphasize what the early fanfare surrounding Francis might mask: “Evangelii Gaudium” was not a new departure. Its critique of unregulated capitalism echoes themes first articulated in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Leo’s emphasis on human dignity and solidarity, as well as his insistence that the virtue of charity must replace

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greed in labor relations, echoed through the twentieth and into the twenty-­first century. The American Catholic Bishops’ 1919 plan for social reconstruction elaborated on plans hatched during the progressive era by many Protestants active in the Social Gospel. The best known document of Vatican II, Gaudium Et Spes (1965), or “Joys and Hopes,” condemned ­“so-called economic laws” that reduced workers to instruments of capital, called for a living wage, and proclaimed the rights of workers to form labor unions. When John Paul II, best known in the United States for his criticism of communism, issued Sollicitudo Rei Socialis in 1987, he hearkened back not only to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio twenty years earlier but also to the spirit of Vatican II and to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Because many Americans associate the Catholic Church with its undeniable conservatism on matters of gender and sexuality and its steadfast opposition to communism, they suppose that the Church aligns with conservatives on economic issues. Yet the Church’s official proclamations for well over a century have consistently condemned the excesses of ­unregulated capitalism and sided with the working people against the wealthy. The “preferential option for the poor,” a term coined by Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe in 1968, springs from a long-standing ­tradition in Catholic doctrine rooted in Matthew 25, “Whatever you did for these my least brethren, you did for me.”8 Francis’s “Evangelii Gaudium” restated earlier calls for economic justice and condemnations of inequality, as did Laudato Si, or “Care for Our Common Home.” There Francis focused on the climate crisis and called for dramatic steps to protect the natural world against human exploitation. Francis denounced the “technocratic paradigm,” which values efficiency above all, because it leads to “compulsive consumerism” devoid of ethical considerations [§203, 207]. Science and engineering are in­ adequate to guide human choices. Reliance on the free market “cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.” In his plea that Catholics seek the common good rather than treating individual self-­interest as paramount, he invoked not only the documents I have ­already mentioned but also Caritatis in Veritate (2009), or “Charity in Truth,” issued by his predecessor Benedict XVI, a pope better known for his theological and liturgical traditionalism than for his stinging critiques of capitalism. “Love for society and commitment to the common good,”

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Francis wrote, are “expressions of a charity that affects not only relationships between individuals” but also what Benedict called, in his indictment of growing inequality and resistance to the necessary redistribution of wealth, “macro-relationships, social, economic and political.” Francis called for a culture oriented toward “social love,” which “moves us to devise larger strategies to halt environmental degradation and to encourage a ‘culture of care’ which permeates all of society” [§232]. An immense gulf separates such words from the prevailing norms of American conservatism since World War II. No wonder that when Laudate Si appeared, a Fox News pundit called Francis “the most dangerous person on the planet.”9 Such encyclicals have inspired generations of Catholic progressives, including not only the bishops who issued the clarion call for economic justice in 1919 but also clerics such as Chicago’s Archbishop Bernard Sheil, who helped Saul Alinsky start the Industrial Areas Foundation, and later Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, who established the Developing Communities Project that employed Obama and other community organizers. For that reason these Catholic priests constitute a crucial, if recently underappreciated, dimension of the tradition of progressive Christianity. We should keep that dimension in focus if we want to understand, even if we cannot move beyond, the culture wars. The divisions within the Catholic tradition are wide, just as wide and even older than those Molly Worthen recently examined in Apostles of Reason, her fine study of the conflicts within the tradition of evangelical Protestantism, and Darren Dochuk laid bare in his explosive study Anointed with Oil.10 Ever since Pope Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum, conservatives within and outside the Catholic Church have contended that he could not have meant what he said. Leo offered a critique of laissez-faire liberalism as stinging as that in Francis’s recent writings. He endorsed both the value of labor unions and the necessity of state intervention because, in his words, of the “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” In place of the dogmas of classical liberalism, Rerum Novarum called for a living wage that would secure the ­dignity of all persons. Like many American progressives at the time, Leo XIII was as critical of revolutionary socialism as he was of unbridled capitalism. Not

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only Marxism but all forms of socialism that ruled out private property ran afoul of the principles laid down by Thomas Aquinas, and it was one of Leo XIII’s other principal objectives as pope to resurrect the ideas of scholasticism and establish them at the heart of all Catholic seminaries. In Rerum Novarum, he sought to occupy a middle ground between laissez-­faire and socialism. For that reason many American progressive reformers considered Catholics such as Father John A. Ryan their allies. Ryan’s writings, particularly his book A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (1906), provided a sturdy rationale for the arguments being made by workers struggling to establish labor unions and the progressive reformers who supported them. In fact, Catholics constituted a substantial majority of churchgoers in most industrial cities, and Rerum Novarum inspired many of those Catholics to link their labor activism to their religious faith.11 Ryan, like most Catholics in Europe and the United States then and now, grounded his political principles on the ideas of natural law and objective truth, ideas antithetical to those embraced by progressives influenced by William James or John Dewey. Pragmatists routinely excoriated scholasticism as unphilosophical and unscientific dogma. But philosophical differences did not prevent many non-­Catholics from allying with Catholics in the labor movement. As Ryan himself put it in a speech in New York, “Since we are all working for the common good, we should aim to emphasize those elements that are common in our social doctrines, and to minimize all differences that are not based on essential principles.”12 Despite the fact that Catholic social and political theory rested on scholastic foundations distinct from pragmatism and from the new social sciences that undergirded much American social and economic reform, shared objectives facilitated at least a degree of cooperation in the ragged coalition of progressives who reshaped America in the early twentieth century. The American Catholic Bishops’ 1919 plan for social reconstruction was among the most prominent examples of reformers’ cooperation. During the 1920s that coalition fell apart, as American culture split along fault lines having to do with the emergence of religious fundamentalism and other social and political reactions against rapid cultural change. During the 1930s, though, the alliance between urban Catholics and liberal Protestants reemerged, and it became an important pillar of

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Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. Father Charles Coughlin was complaining about his fellow priest when he called Ryan “Right Reverend New Dealer,” but the characterization was accurate enough. And Ryan was no outlier. Pope Pius XI called for active support of labor organizing again in Quadragesimo Anno (1931), an encyclical intended to ­underscore the urgency of attending to Pope Leo’s call for distributive justice as economies around the world descended into the Great Depression.13 Only in the late 1960s and 1970s, and for reasons having to do with issues other than labor organizing and economic equality, did many American Catholic workers begin gravitating toward the Republican Party. The animosity toward Catholics expressed openly by thinkers such as James and Dewey, and sometimes—more often in private—even by their political allies such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Florence Kelley, and Jane Addams, is hard to fathom if one looks only at Rerum Novarum and Ryan’s arguments for a living wage. But those arguments, like the arguments in Francis’s “Evangelii Gaudium,” did not emerge in a vacuum. Instead they reflected the tensions lingering from earlier stages of the culture wars.14 Ultramontane Catholicism had done much to earn the suspicion of nineteenth-century liberals. The French Revolution, particularly in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, had forced French priests and their congregations to choose between their religious faith and their commitment to the republic, and that militant secularism had flavored movements toward greater democracy throughout Europe. In response to decades-­long attempts at deconfessionalization by secular reformers, the Catholic Church set itself in implacable opposition to liberté, egalité, and fraternité, as well as science, democracy, and anything that resembled ­either the Enlightenment or the revolutions that celebrations of reason were thought to spawn.15 Thus in 1864 Pius IX announced the Syllabus of Errors, condemning everything modern as contrary to Catholic doctrine. He convened the First Vatican Council, which first promulgated the notorious doctrine of papal infallibility. When the nation of Italy emerged from the Franco-Prussian War and declared its sovereignty over the entire peninsula, the pope excommunicated all the leaders of the new nation and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican. Most disastrously of all, at

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least for many American Catholics, Pius IX condemned the idea of religious pluralism. Not only were other religions false, but Catholics were enjoined to work for the unification of church and state under the authority of the Catholic hierarchy. As John McGreevy has shown in Catholicism and American Freedom, there was a lot in nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism for non-Catholic Americans not to like, and much for later progressive Catholic Americans to regret.16 That is why Vatican II was so crucial. The Catholic turn toward religious pluralism in the 1960s was deeply indebted to the Americans who helped shape the outcome of the council. John Courtney Murray, surely the best known of these American Catholics, played an important role. But Murray was just one among many clerics and lay advisers at Vatican II who first advanced an argument that has since become standard among sociologists of religion. Whereas European nations emerged from the chaos of the sixteenth-century wars of religion as confessional states, in which a single faith was declared the official state religion, England’s North American colonies were havens for a motley collection of dissenters.17 For that reason the idea of a single, official, national religion was already implausible by the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified. David Sehat has made a convincing case in The Myth of American Religious Freedom for the de facto establishment of Protestant Christianity as the more or less official religion of the new nation,18 but that “more or less” was immensely significant, particularly when the United States is compared with the nations across the Atlantic. Whereas European dissidents everywhere had to struggle for centuries to topple state religions and establish the freedom of conscience as an important principle, a tradition of dissent in England’s North American colonies began almost as soon as orthodoxy was declared. Historians of American religions reading Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom must have wondered if the drafters were aware how closely they hewed to the arguments that Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Thomas Hooker used against John Winthrop. Of course the presence of all those dissenting Puritans in the New World was itself a consequence of the bloody wars of religion that shaped the entire history of Europe and the western hemisphere. Brad Gregory argued in The Unintended Reformation that all the ­conflicts in Western civilization—all of our culture wars right down to

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the present day—descend directly from those sixteenth-century conflicts. I admire Gregory’s erudition, and I have learned a lot about the Refor­mation from both of his books, yet I think he exaggerates the degree of ­unanimity that existed prior to the protests by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers. Because the Reformation authorized challenges to the idea that the Catholic Church had sole possession of a unitary, unchanging, absolute truth, Gregory contends that we have suffered ever since from a debilitating pluralism and relativism. Individuals’ desires have become sovereign because in our celebration of diversity we have lost touch with the idea that, in Gregory’s words, there is “truth in the domains of human morality, values, and meaning.”19 As scholars such as Hans Küng have shown, however, Christians began arguing about the meaning of their faith, and about the proper practice of the virtue of caritas central to the earliest Christian communities, not in the early sixteenth century but as early the second or third century. It was then that early Christian writers such as Justin and Origen tried to bolster the new faith against pagan critics by downplaying the first Christians’ emphasis on simple communities of believers living together in a spirit of Christian love. Instead they constructed a theology that displaced caritas and elevated the doctrine of a divine logos that drives history, thereby setting off the first culture wars to erupt within the Christian tradition. Confidence in unchanging truth and absolute authority entered a new phase when a late-fourth-century bishop of Rome named Sirisius declared himself pope, another when his successors proposed the previously unknown idea that there could be no appeal beyond the authority of the pope, and yet another when Augustine tried to silence the Donatist and Pelagian heresies by emphasizing the institutional authority of the church and advancing the fateful ideas of original sin, predestination, and the Trinity.20 My point is that Christianity splintered early. Critics and reformers almost from the start challenged emerging doctrines and practices, and disputed the authority of church leaders, by characterizing them as contrary to the authentic message of Jesus. As crucial as the Reformation was, and as crucial as the culture wars of the 1920s—and those since the 1960s—have been in the United States, all of those battles rest on top of layers of conflict, buried strata from earlier struggles, that go back as far as the origin of Christianity.

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I spent two decades writing my book Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, a study that begins in the ancient world and pivots on the long-term consequences of the sixteenth-­ century wars of religion. I argue that the recurrent battles over theology, metaphysics, ethics, and political theory, battles that have raged from the Reformation to our own day, constitute a continuing struggle to understand and live up to the ideals of what we now call the Judeo-Christian tradition. The history of democracy is a series of culture wars between the living spirit of caritas and its degradation and deformation into absolutist dogmas of various kinds. If progressive as well as conservative ­believers were to place alongside the central virtue of caritas another Christian virtue, humility, as it manifested itself in the lives of, say, Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, they might be less inclined to claim sole possession of the truth or to reject as nonnegotiable the ideas and practices of people who disagree with them. Cultivating such a disposition might make all of us, whether we are religious or not, better democratic citizens, somewhat less sure of ourselves and of our own grip on truth.21 Ever since Vatican II, at least some parts of the Catholic Church have been moving slowly, in fits and starts, in that direction. Vatican II officially acknowledged both the legitimacy of diversity and the separation of church and state. Since the mid-1960s, members of the Catholic Church have become accustomed to proclaiming such ideas, as Francis and his predecessors have done, as the authentic principles of Christian teaching. When one combines the criticism of capitalism descended from Leo XIII and John Ryan with the religious pluralism proclaimed by John XXIII and John Courtney Murray, it is possible to see how the activism of Barack Obama, Christian and skeptic, can be traced back to his experience with Catholic social action. If that is true, why then was Obama subjected to so much criticism, both from conservative Catholics and from evangelical Christians? Why did so many conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants vote for Trump, who promised a return to the unregulated capitalism condemned by popes since Leo XIII? The answer has to do with the deep and ob­ vious rifts within contemporary American culture, and that is true within the communities of Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, African Americans and white Americans, and atheists and agnostics. Just as

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American Protestantism has been divided from the beginning, with disgruntled Congregationalists establishing Yale because they lost hope that Harvard could ever be saved, and Methodists and Baptists fracturing over slavery, so twentieth-century evangelical Protestantism has never been monolithic. Neither has American Catholicism. Colleen McDannell’s The Spirit of Vatican II shows vividly how one Catholic family, progressive on some issues and traditional on others, handled its dissatisfactions with Catholic teachings before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. McDannell’s mother, who is the ­protagonist of her fine book, chafed under the discipline of 1950s Catholicism and welcomed the reforms of Vatican II. But she was among the millions of American Catholics who believed the changes did not go far enough. When Pope Paul VI rejected the findings of the commission he authorized to study contraception, for example, her mother was among the countless Catholics who expressed their outrage. Since then American Catholic women have followed their own consciences rather than official church teaching, and the percentage of Catholic women who have practiced birth control, and who have had abortions since Roe v. Wade, has varied little from the percentage of non-Catholics. McDannell’s mother was equally upset when the hierarchy ignored another study, this one in 1971, that found no historical or theological grounds for the doctrine of celibacy.22 In recent decades, of course, the frustrations of progressive Catholics have grown. When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger helped Pope John Paul II tug the church back toward pre–Vatican II forms of worship, and when, as his successor, Benedict XVI, Ratzinger disciplined wayward priests and nuns who deviated from orthodoxy or questioned the Church’s response to the exposure of child abuse, millions of Catholics protested and many left the Church. Many of those disgruntled C ­ atholics—and former Catholics—now nod in assent to the papacy of Francis. Some of them at least relished the prospect that those who once hunted down dissidents, like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Boston’s former Cardinal Bernard Law, might become the hunted—or at least lose their privileged and influential positions. Like members of evangelical Protestant denominations, American Catholics have long been an unruly bunch. It is certainly true that Rome’s

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authority powerfully influenced American Catholics, with consequences that soured relations between Catholics and non-Catholics. Yet tensions have existed within the Church as well. Since the papacy of Leo XIII, and especially since Vatican II, progressives have proclaimed with as much passion, as much conviction, and, I would say, as much accuracy, as conservatives that they embody the genuine principles of a Catholic tradition understood, as in the documents of Vatican II, as a Pilgrim Church, a church always searching for answers rather than already claiming to know the final truth. That is the Catholicism that Obama encountered in Holy Rosary parish, and that is why he was drawn to the people he worked with there. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama traced the long history of Americans whose commitment to social reform was inspired by their religious faith. From John Adams and John Leland in the eighteenth century, and Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in the nineteenth, through the ­Social Gospel proclaimed by Walter Rauschenbusch and John Ryan, and from Martin Luther King Jr. and T. D. Jakes to Rick Warren and Jim Wallis, Obama lists many predecessors who combined a Christian faith with progressive politics. He understands that identifying religious faith with political and cultural conservatism, which many contemporary Americans left and right take for granted, has never been inevitable and has always been contested. My book Reading Obama traces Obama’s discussion of religion and politics in his writings and in the speeches he gave in the early years of his presidency. Many of his critics see a paradox in Obama’s own Christian faith and his frank admission of the limitations of our knowledge. Obama unhesitatingly accepts what he calls Christianity’s “value of love and charity, humility and grace,” yet he also embraces the cultural pluralism of anthropologists, the antifoundationalism of historians of science, and the fallibilism of pragmatist philosophers. Obama’s tradition of Christianity strikes many Americans as novel, but its roots are deep. It derives from the early Christians’ commitment to caritas over logos and the tradition of Christian skepticism that stretches from Erasmus to  twentieth-century Christian theologians who rejected dogma and conceived of faith as a struggle with doubt.23 Let me end with the deeper paradox of Obama’s progressive Christianity. His respect for believers and his own religious faith led him to

Progressive Politics and Religious Faith  331

host the first Easter breakfast and the first Passover Seder in the White House, a photograph of which adorned the poster for our 2014 Danforth conference. Yet many conservatives who call themselves Christians, and at least one of the most astute scholars of American religion, David Hollinger, question whether Obama’s version of Christianity should count as religion at all. It seems instead just a veiled form of secularism. In the revised version of the paper Hollinger delivered at the Danforth Center around the time that Pope Francis released “Evangelii Gaudium,” he argues that proponents of liberal Catholicism such as Charles Taylor and James Carroll, and of liberal Protestantism such as Harvey Cox, contribute to the further secularization of American culture whether they know it or not. They serve, in Hollinger’s phrase, as “stepping stones” toward a “post-Christian” world. Inasmuch as they follow in the path of William James in treating religious faith in terms of the meaning it provides for believers’ lives rather than in terms of their obedience to a ­supernatural being, they belong not to the category of the religious but to the category of the secular. Hollinger contends, in a passage italicized to signal its importance to his argument, that “the more one knows about the world, the less inclined one is to ascribe to supernatural authority whatever value one finds in the teachings and social function of Protestant and Catholic churches, and the less inclined one is to invoke supernatural authority as a warrant for whatever specific worldly conduct one advocates.”24 If Hollinger is right, then one might expect that the upbringing of Barack Obama would be a textbook example of how secu­ larization works. His mother made sure he understood the core of Christianity—and that he was familiar with the basics of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, and, as he put it in The Audacity of Hope, “the gods of Greek and Norse and African mythology.”25 Even though Obama’s mother carefully explained to him the sociocultural functions of religious belief, he did not grow up to become Émile Durkheim. Instead, dissatisfied with his own rootlessness, he became immersed in the community of Holy Rosary parish, then of Trinity United Church of Christ. That experience, he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.” But he also realized, in his words, “that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.” He decided to become baptized by Jeremiah Wright, and he and his fiancée

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Michelle Robinson later decided to be married in Wright’s church, because he found in the Christian message the source of sustaining purpose that had been missing in his life. “It came about,” he wrote, “as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”26 That choice, to believe in spite of nagging doubts, has been made by millions of Americans drawn toward varieties of religious faith not because of its “social function,” or as a warrant for “worldly conduct,” as Hollinger puts it, but because they feel “God’s spirit,” to use Obama’s words, beckoning them through the fog of their misgivings. Doubt is as old, and perhaps as venerable, in Christian traditions as unquestioning faith. It need not make uncertain believers less devout than those Christians who claim never to have experienced second thoughts about their religious convictions, or less committed to science than those atheists or agnostics whom Hollinger dubs “post-Christians.” Being fully committed to scientific inquiry can be consistent with being fully committed to certain kinds—although perhaps not to all kinds—of religious belief. The difference between religious and nonreligious progressives sometimes derives from believers’ doubts that scientific inquiry can answer all the questions we face, including questions about how we should live. The point I want to make in conclusion is simply that Obama’s choice seems to me not merely an empty gesture but a real choice, a decision to opt for a particular orientation toward the meaning of his life. Elsewhere in The Audacity of Hope he explains the persistence of religious observance in America with these words: Americans “are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life.” Rather than just traveling down “a long highway toward nothingness,” at least some of them travel instead, as Obama himself did, toward religion, but toward a form of religion consistent with their doubts, their awareness of complexity, and their passion for trying to understand the world through science rather than escaping from it. In that commitment too, there are parallels be-

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tween Obama’s faith, that of Pope Francis, and the faith expressed by a number of contemporary progressives in public life. Expressions of such religious commitment have been as evident in 2020 as they have been at earlier moments in U.S. history. Candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, for example, frequently quoted from the Bible in campaign speeches and debates. Against those who would use “religion to justify discrimination,” Cory Booker quoted Micah 6:8: “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly” with the Lord. Kamala Harris argued that Americans must expand the meaning of “love thy neighbor” to include the homeless and the immigrant. Speaking at the Apostolic Faith Church in Chicago on June 24, 2019, Elizabeth Warren quoted Matthew 25 at length to explain why she works against poverty, ill health, homelessness, racism, and opposition to immigration. Invoking her years teaching Methodist Sunday school, Warren said her faith taught her that “God is in every one of us” and that we are enjoined to act always on behalf of “the least of my brethren.” She concluded with a verse from Timothy: God gave us not the spirit of fear but “the spirit of power and love.” Former South Bend mayor Peter Buttigieg, raised in a nominally Catholic household and educated in a Catholic high school, referred often to his membership in a South Bend Episcopal congregation and spoke passionately about the Christian foundations of his views on social policy. Other young Democrats, such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams, have also referred to their religious upbringing—AOC was raised Catholic; both of Abrams’s ­parents are United Methodist ministers—when asked to explain their political positions. Of course these Democrats disagree with each other on all sorts of things. They have used the Bible to justify a variety of plans and programs, some speaking in terms of experimentation and deliberation and others in terms of their own nonnegotiable demands. Con­ servatives likewise have quoted their own favorite verses for centuries, whether to justify slavery or oppose women’s suffrage, abortion, or gay marriage. Throughout American history, Christian principles have often been used to defend hierarchies. They have also served to fortify resistance.27 On June 1, 2020, police used tear gas and flash grenades to break up a peaceful protest near the White House. After the smoke had cleared,

334  James T. Kloppenberg

the president strutted across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he brandished a Bible in the photo op that served as his reply to the Black Lives Matter protests spreading around the world. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, most Democrats, many Catholics, and many conservative Evangelicals expressed outrage. Speaking for ­progressive Americans in a speech delivered the next day, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden emphasized the essential principle of Christianity, “We are called to love one another as we love ourselves.” He condemned the nation’s history of racism and the president’s strategy of heightening tensions. Trump played to Americans’ “selfishness and fear” instead of calling for equality and justice, the principles that Biden properly identified as the highest ideals of American democracy. So, can religion help us move beyond the culture wars in our understanding of the relation between politics and religion in modern American history? Of course we must first complicate any one-dimensional understandings of what counts as “conservative” or “liberal” religion. As I’ve tried to show by looking at the Catholic example, there are crosscutting pressures at work in all religious traditions, at any moment as well as across time. But whether we are looking at Justin or Augustine, Luther or Calvin, Winthrop or Hutchinson, Jane Addams or John Ryan, Whittaker Chambers or William F. Buckley, César Chávez or Daniel Berrigan, Phyllis Schlafly or Elizabeth Warren, Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama, Franklin Graham or William Barber, Pope Benedict or Pope Francis, the conflicts between contemporary believers, within as well as across traditions, suggest that the persistence of culture wars is a perennial feature of our history unlikely to end any time soon. Yet I find myself not consoled by that knowledge. Instead I am deeply disturbed by the particularly intense conflicts of our own moment and by the ever-increasing polarization of American public life. It reflects not merely the willingness of wealthy right-wingers to fund those fanning the flames of the culture wars, important as that factor has been, but it also signals the return of the deepest divide in American history. It is a divide that threatens the cultural foundation on which democracy rests, the fragile ethic of reciprocity, which is central to my argument in Toward Democracy. The rise and spread of democratic ideas is the focus of the book, but it also explores the devastating and long-lasting effects on

Progressive Politics and Religious Faith  335

self-government of civil war, particularly the sixteenth-century wars of religion, the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, the civil war that the French Revolution became in the 1790s, and, of greatest significance here, the disastrous and lasting effects of the U.S. Civil War. Although that war did end slavery, and the Civil War amendments ostensibly secured equal rights for all Americans, the end of Reconstruction reestablished the subjugation of African Americans and enshrined white supremacy. The retreat from Reconstruction and the arrival of Jim Crow cemented the conviction of many Americans, North and South, that the United States would remain a white man’s nation even if the Confederacy had been defeated.28 The increasing sharpness of the partisan divide in national elections since the 1970s is undeniable. The resurgence of Confederate symbols and slogans in recent decades is not the harmless expression of nostalgia but a sign that racism and xenophobia remain treasured values for many Americans. The unprecedented lack of respect accorded to Barack Obama in Congress and in the news media—including but hardly limited to the editors of Fortune magazine—likewise signals the persistence of a sensibility that his election as president only inflamed. For many Americans, the struggle to preserve white male supremacy is part of a broader campaign to defend a conservative notion of the United States as a Christian nation. To many Americans that means opposing not only progressives’ cultural agenda but also rejecting progressive taxation; economic regulation; insurance against unemployment, old age, and illness; the rights of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community; and international cooperation. Given the aims and influence of many conservative American Evangelicals, it is no surprise that many on the political left, and some scholars, contend that only those who renounce religion in any form are capable of thinking for themselves. Only they are capable of battling the particularly virulent forms of hatred that tarnish the name of American conservatism. That judgment is mistaken. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature of much religiosity in the contemporary United States as well as American history. Many American believers have been seekers and skeptics, activists and coalition builders, not defenders of dogma and exclusion. Suspicion of progressive believers complicates the task of forging

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alliances between religious and secular Americans who share progressive aspirations. If such alliances were possible among earlier insurgents, ­including eighteenth-century champions of independence, nineteenth-­ century abolitionists, and twentieth-century progressives, New Dealers, and members of the civil rights and antiwar movements, surely they should remain possible for feminists, LGBTQ activists, members of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, and others engaged in forms of progressive political action today. Such alliances will be possible, however, only if people of faith open their minds to those who do not share their religious beliefs, and if nonreligious progressives acknowledge that it is possible to be religious without being dogmatic. If both believers and nonbelievers were to see religious beliefs as compatible with doubt rather than requiring proclamations of certainty, then disagreements about metaphysical as well as political questions might be seen as differences of perspective—differences to be discussed, understood, and respected— rather than reasons for bringing conversations to an end.

Notes 1. My discussion of Obama draws on James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); on Obama’s own books Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 2nd ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004; first published 1995) and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2006); and We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, ed. E. J. Dionne and Joy-Ann Reid (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); and the two most detailed biographies yet published, David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010); and David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (New York: Harper Collins, 2017). Through prodigious research, Garrow pieced together previously unknown details of Obama’s life and identified many individuals who, as Obama freely admitted in Dreams from My Father, appeared in his memoir as composite characters. 2. Obama, Dreams, 293–95. Garrow contends that Wright first delivered the sermon entitled “The Audacity of Hope” three years before Obama claimed to have heard it and that Wright did not deliver it again until 1991. Garrow notes that a tape of the sermon was for sale at Trinity and that Obama clearly knew it well by the time he was writing Dreams. See Garrow, Rising Star, 469.

Progressive Politics and Religious Faith  337 3. Remnick, The Bridge, 174. 4.  Howard Chua-Eoan and Elizabeth Dias, “Person of the Year: Pope Francis, the People’s Pope,” Time, December 11, 2013; John Cassidy, “Pope Francis’s Challenge to Global Capitalism,” New Yorker, December 3, 2013; “Pope Francis’s First Year: Faith, Hope, and How Much Change,” Economist, December 3, 2013; “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Fortune, March 20, 2014. 5.  David Hollinger, “Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, ed. Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-­ Rosenhagen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 280–303. For the most recent report on religious affiliation from the Pew Research Center, see “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,” October 17, 2019, https:// www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at -rapid-pace/. 6.  All the papal documents discussed in this chapter are now conveniently accessible at the Vatican website: www.vatican.va. 7.  “Evangelii Gaudium,” §2. The references in the text will be to the sections in documents issued by the Vatican. 8.  Among the many studies of Catholic social thought, useful collections include Aaron I. Abell, ed., American Catholic Thought on Social Questions (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); Patrick W. Carey, ed., American Catholic Religious Thought: The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); and R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach, eds., Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Scott Appleby and Mary Jo Weaver, eds., Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Mary Jo Weaver, What’s Left: Liberal American Catholics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and James L. Heft, ed., Faith and the Intellectual Life: ­Marianist Award Lectures (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). See also the spirited critique and overview in David J. O’Brien, “The Missing Piece: The Renewal of Catholic Americanism,” Marianist Award Lecture, 2005 (Dayton, OH: University of Dayton, 2008); the magisterial study by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); and the unrelenting critique of modernity from the perspective of a radical Catholic ­dissident, Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019). 9.  Joanna Rothkopf, “Fox News’ Greg Gutfield is Not Happy with the Pope: ‘The Most Dangerous Person on the Planet,’” Salon, June 17, 2015, https:// www.salon.com/2015/06/17/fox_news_greg_gutfeld_is_not_happy_with_the _pope_the_most_dangerous_person_on_the_planet/. 10.  Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Darren Dochuk,

338  James T. Kloppenberg Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019). 11.  John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 128. 12.  Ryan, quoted in McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 141. 13.  See James Terence Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933– 1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 14.  On another dimension of this issue, the tensions between conservative American Catholics and many American progressive reformers, see Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 15.  John McGreevy, “Democracy,” chapter 3 of Catholicism: A Global History (New York: Norton, forthcoming). 16. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom. 17.  John Courtney Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965). See also David Hollenbach, “The Church’s Social Mission in a Pluralistic Society,” in Vatican II: The Unfinished Agenda, ed. Lucien Richard, Daniel Harrington, and John W. O’Malley (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 113–38. 18.  David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19.  Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 18; and see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 20.  Among the countless studies of early Christianity, a good introduction is Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History, trans. John Bowden (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 21.  James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). My emphasis on the role of Christianity in the rise of democracy has been the subject of lively debate in several of the forums on the book. See, for example, those in Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 2 (August 2019); and Journal of Politics, Religion, and Ideology (Spring 2018). 22.  Colleen McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 23. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 235–68; and Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, 140–49, 197–218. 24.  Hollinger, “Christianity and Its American Fate,” 296. Yet Hollinger has been resolute in acknowledging, as he puts it on 294–95, that “some of the most learned men and women in the world affirm supernatural authority” and maintain their religious beliefs “while accommodating the most warranted historical,

Progressive Politics and Religious Faith  339 social, and natural scientific knowledge of their own epochs.” He has also demonstrated, in many essays and in his magisterial Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), the profound changes in worldview for which liberal ­Protestants—and their children, who transformed American intellectual life in the late twentieth century—are responsible. 25. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 241. 26. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 208, 245. 27.  For further discussion of these issues, see the essays in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), particularly the essay by Michael O’Brien, “The American Experience of Secularisation,” 133–49; James T. Kloppenberg, “Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life,” in Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 38–58; Kloppenberg, “Hope against Hype: How Should Democracies Deal with Irreconcilable Differences,” Commonweal 146, no. 14 (September 2019): 52–57; and Kloppenberg, “Reading Buttigieg,” Commonweal 147, no. 3 (March 2020): 24–33. 28.  Among the many recent studies detailing the reasons why the Republican Party has slid so far to the right, see especially E. J. Dionne, Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas Mann, One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017); Greg Sargent, An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 2018); and Michael Tomasky, If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved (New York: Liveright, 2019). On what progressives should do in response, see E. J. Dionne, Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country (New York: St. Martin’s, 2020); and Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (New York: Knopf, 2020).

CONTRIBUTORS

Kate Bowler is associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America and executive director of the Everything Happens Initiative at Duke Divinity School. She is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, which traces the history of the movement based on divine promises of health, wealth, and happiness. Then, after being unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age thirty-five, she penned the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. Her book The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) follows the rise of celebrity Christian women in American evangelicalism. Mark Brilliant is associate professor of history and American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also director of UC Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary American Studies Program. He is the author of The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), which won the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History and received honorable mention from the Organization of American Historians for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Kathleen Sprows Cummings is the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. She is also professor of American studies and history at Notre Dame, and the author of A Saint of Our Own: 340

Contributors 341

How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Darren Dochuk is the Andrew V. Tackes College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He most recently authored Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America and is editor and co-editor of a number of books, including American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). Janine Giordano Drake is clinical assistant professor of history at Indiana University, where she specializes in U.S. social and labor history. She is coeditor of The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) and has contributed to a number of books and journals, including Religion is Raced (New York: NYU Press, 2020) and The Religious Left in Modern America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is currently completing her manuscript “War for the Soul of the Christian Nation: Socialism and the American Churches.” Benjamin Francis-Fallon is associate professor of history and director of social sciences education at Western Carolina University. He is author of The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), which received the Shapiro Book Prize from the Huntington Library, the Américo Paredes Book Award from the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College, and honorable mention for the Theodore Saloutous Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He has written four books, coedited two others, and published dozens of articles on politics and ideas. His first book, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), was awarded the Merle Curti Prize by the Organization of American Historians. Most recently, his Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope,

342 Contributors

and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) was named Book of the Year by PBS White House correspondent Mara Liasson, while Toward Democracy: The Struggle for SelfRule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) was awarded the George Mosse Prize in intellectual history by the American Historical Association. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim, Danforth, and Whiting foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the ­Humanities, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Joseph Kip Kosek has written widely on religion and politics in modern America. He is the author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), which was based on a dissertation that won the Allan Nevins Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. History, and editor of American Religion, American Politics: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Patrick Q. Mason holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, where he is an associate professor of religious studies and history. He is the author or editor of several books, including Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019) and What Is Mormonism? A Student’s Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2017). Michelle Nickerson is associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) and coeditor of Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Andrew Preston is professor of American history and a fellow of Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He has published seven books, including Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012) and, most recently, American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Contributors 343

Josef Sorett is professor and chair of the Department of Religion and professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University, where he also directs the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. Sorett is the author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), and he has two forthcoming projects: The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an American Secular (Oxford University Press, 2021) and an edited volume, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches (Columbia University Press, 2021). Matthew Avery Sutton is the Berry Family Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts at Washington State University. His most recent book is Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States during the Second World War (New York: Basic Books, 2019). He is also the ­author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), and Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Wendy L. Wall is associate professor of history at Binghamton University and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Hu­ manities. She is the author of Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Ellis Hawley Prize, as well as articles and book chapters on the New Deal, the interfaith movement, and American civil religion. She received an NEH Fellowship to support her current book project, an ­examination of the grassroots politics of postwar immigration reform. Keith Makoto Woodhouse is associate professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the History Department and directs the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. He is the author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

INDEX

Abbey of Gethsemani, 258 abortion, 2–3, 282 Catholic opposition to, 224, 247, 262–63, 316, 318 Christian right opposition to, 105, 267, 283–84, 333 environmentalist support for, 270 foreign aid and, 156 Latino Pentecostal opposition to, 291 LDS opposition to, 80 Nixon’s Catholic strategy and, 224, 236 progressive support for, 329 ACLU, 128, 131 Addams, Jane, 325, 334 African Americans, 60 agrarianism of, 43 Americanization, 65 Baptists and, 64 Black religion, 61, 62 exclusion from military service, 58 farmers, 43 international significance of, 59 Hispanic voters and, 223–25 Methodists and, 64 Nixon campaign strategy and, 224–26, 31 See also Phylon journal

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 60 agrarianism, 37, 45 African Americans and, 43 Catholics and, 45–46, 48 core value of property ownership, 38, 41, 44, 47, 51–52 distinct from Left-Right ­dichotomy, 38–39 khaddar system and, 49–50 patriarchal ideals, 47–48 race and, 42–43 vision of, 38 See also Ligutti, Luigi agrarians, 39, 41 Confederate nostalgia of, 43 importance of regional identity, 42 religious modernism of, 40, 42 See also Ransom, John Crowe Alinsky, Saul, 323 Allende, Salvador, 184 America, 188 American Committee on Italian ­Migration, 114 American Federation of Labor, 18–19, 23, 29 American Friends Service Committee, 106 344

Index 345 American Jewish Committee, 102, 114 Anti-Defamation League, 102, 114 antinuclear movement, 261–62 Antioch College, 51 anti-Semitism anti-communism and, 169 foreign relations and, 162–64 immigration reform and, 110–11 Progressives and, 163 in Russia, 160, 165 in the United States, 161 Aranza, Jacob, 306 Árbenz, Jacobo, 183–84 Armendariz, Alex, 236 Assemblies of God, 191, 294, 296 Atlantic Monthly, 25, 71 Baptists, 178, 329 immigration and, 114 opposition to espionage, 189–90 similarities between white and Black churches, 64 Barnes, Roswell P., 111 Bay of Pigs, 184 Beans, Sipio, 67 Belloc, Hilaire, 44 Benedict XVI (pope), 322, 329 Benson, Ezra Taft, 88 conservative political views of, 90–91 effect of LDS religion on, 89, 91 perspective on moral decay, 91–92 presidential ambitions, 91 support for John Birch Society, 91 Bergoglio, Jorge Mario. See Francis (pope) Bernadin, Joseph, 323 Berrigan, Daniel, 258, 334 abortion and, 247, 262 hero of Catholic Left, 253

masculinity and, 247 women’s movement and, 261 Berrigan, Phillip, 258 abortion and, 247, 262–63 hero of Catholic Left, 253 women’s movement and, 261 Berry, Wendell, 52, 269 Bethlehem Ministers’ Association, 22–23 Biden, Joe, 334 Birch, John, 178–79, 195 namesake society, 91, 179 Birdsall, Judd, 171 Black internationalism, 71 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, 334, 336 Black Power, 8, 255 Blaine, James G., 160–61, 163 Bolick, Clint, 127, 144 Bond, Horace Mann, 58 Boxer, Barbara, 171 Boy Scouts, 93 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 56, 58, 72–73 aestheticized religiosity and, 71 Brower, David, 284 Brown, Sterling, 71 Brown v. Board of Education, 131 Bryn Mawr, 206 Buchanan, Patrick J., 1, 4–5, 234, 237, 267 Buckley, William F., 182, 334 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 1, 232, 267 position at the CIA, 192–93 Bush, George W., 126, 143, 171, 269 White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 295 Bush, Jeb, 300 business. See capitalism

346 Index Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking People (CCOSSP), 227–28 California Supreme Court, 130–32, 140 California Teachers Association, 142 Campbell, Simone, 201–2, 205, 210–11, 217 Campbell, William, 137–38 capitalism, 48 Catholicism and, 44, 46 excesses of, 21 mainline Protestantism and, 39 Nixon’s “Black Capitalism” program, 231 religion and, 37–38, 40, 50, 299 religious support for, 21, 24, 29 socialism and, 24, 50 as spiritual crisis, 37, 40 syndicalist critiques of, 30 theological critiques of, 18–19, 21 Carlyle, Thomas, 40 Carroll, Howard J., 108–9 Carroll, James, 331 Carter, Jimmy, 156 evangelicals and, 156 White House Conference on the Family, 275 Castillo, Martin, 231 Catholic Charities, 102, 106 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Catholic Press Association, 108 Catholic Relief Services, 110 Catholic University of America, 203–4 Catholic Worker, 44, 248, 256–57 Catholic Worker movement, 44–45, 257 abortion and, 262–63 formation of, 256–57

Central African Republic, 68 Central Conference of American Rabbis, 20 Chandler, Edgar, 101–2 Chesterton, G. K., 44 China, 101, 103, 155, 178–79 missionaries and, 192 religious freedom and, 157 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 162 Christian Century opposition to CIA use of missionaries, 185, 188, 192 “surplus” population and, 112 Christian Democratic Party, 184 Christian fundamentalism, 52, 271, 276, 324 Christianity cultural pluralism and, 60 environmentalism and, 268–69 government and, 188 idea of a “Christian America,” 19, 26 informal religious practice of, 21 in global South, 188, 297 modernist, 59–60, 62 organized labor’s relationship with, 17–19, 23–24, 29, 31 religious crisis after WWI and, 72 socialism as alternative to, 24 social reform and, 18, 20, 25, 27–31 social responsibility, 19 World War I and, 31 See also Pentecostalism; religion; Roman Catholicism; Social Gospel Christianity and Crisis, 185, 190, 192 Christianity Today, 188 Christian Socialism, 19, 21, 24, 30–31. See also Social Gospel; socialism Christian Socialist Fellowship, 21, 24 Church, Frank, 185, 254

Index 347 “Church Committee,” 185–86, 254 CIA response to, 186 Churches of Christ, 102 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) anthropocentric ethic of, 83, 93 conservation efforts of, 86, 88 conservative politics and, 78 cosmology of, 81 environmental politics of, 79–80, 83–84, 93–94 and federal government, 85 political mobilization of, 79, 84 Prop 8 and, 79 Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, 86, 88 theology of creation, 83, 87, 93 Church of the Nazarene, 190 CIA, 178, 181 media coverage of, 184–85, 186, 188 “Organization of the Militant Godless” and, 183 public response to, 189–92 religion and, 179, 182, 184–87 revised missionary policy of, 192–94 City Beautiful, 86 civil rights movement, 37, 49, 51, 112, 246, 284 Catholic involvement in, 209, 255 Civil War, 43, 161–62 Clement, Rufus, 58 Clinton, Bill, 1, 171, 267, 282 Clune, William, 129–30, 139 Cochran, N. D., 24 Colby, William, 189 Cold War, 37, 170, 182, 186 ideological diversity of, 39 John Birch Society and, 179 religion and, 182 religious freedom and, 169, 171

Coleman, James, 134, 136–37, 141–42 Colson, Chuck, and parochial education, 235 Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) hiring Mexican American operatives, 235–36 communism, 47, 52. See also Cold War Conference of Major Superiors of Women (CMSW), 203, 207, 211–14, 216 “Sisters’ Survey” for, 212 Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes, 211, 213–14 conservatism, 38, 49 Catholicism and, 233, 316 education and, 126, 134–35 environmentalism and, 268 evangelicalism and, 277 Pentecostalism and, 291, 295, 304 Consortium Perfectae Caritatis, 213 Cook, W. Mercer, 57, 68 Coons, John ( Jack), 127, 131, 133 background, 128 Catholic hierarchy and, 142–43 disagreement with Friedman, 134–35 school choice and, 138–39, 141, 144 sectarian education and, 131–32 views on school finance inequality, 129–30 Coston, Carol, 214–16 Coulborn, Rushton, 58 Covell, Ralph R., 191 Crawford v. Los Angeles, 136 culture wars, 158, 319, 323, 325 democracy and, 334–35 motif of, 1–2, 5 Cushing, Richard, 108

348 Index Davidon, William, 253–55 Davidson, Donald, 39, 42–43 Davis, Arthur, 71 Day, Dorothy, 44, 248, 258 Rerum Novarum and, 256 Dean, William H., Jr., 57 de Jesús, Wilfredo, 291 Delgado, Alberto, 290–91, 300 contrast with Kenneth Hagin, 298 television show, 296–97 de León, Daniel, 294–95 Democratic Party, 155, 325, 333 National Convention, 272 Dewey, John, 324–25 Dirksen, Everett, 117–18 dispensationalism, 26 distributism, 44 district power equalizing, 130–31, 145 end in California, 140 family power equalizing and, 133 subsidiarity and, 134 vouchers and, 133 Dobson, James, 268 Donovan, William “Wild Bill,” 181 Dooley, Tom, 184 Double Victory campaign, 59 Nazism and, 69–70 Douglass, Frederick, 330 Du Bois, W. E. B., 56–58, 62–63, 66 Dulles, Allen, 181–82 Dulles, John Foster, 182 Eagleson, Oran W., 58 Earth First!, 281 ecology, 79, 272–73, 279–80 effects of overcultivation on, 86–87 LDS pragmatic ethic of, 85 LDS silence on, 80, 84 political conservatism and, 89

religious development and, 83–84, 91 See also environmentalism Eddy, William, 183 education bilingual education, 237, 239 busing and, 126, 129, 135–36, 142, 224 parochial education, 235 racial segregation and, 128–30 school choice and, 127, 132, 134–36, 144 See also school vouchers Education by Choice organization, 141 Ehrenfeld, David, 278–79, 281 Ehrlichman, John, 231 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 88–90 “religious Cold War” and, 169, 182 Ely, Richard, 29 emancipation, 64 environmentalism conservative LDS environmen­ talism, 94 culture wars and, 268–69 similarities to religious fundamentalism, 271 See also ecology Episcopalians. See Protestant ­Episcopal Church Ervin, Sam, 114–15, 117 espionage. See intelligence Ettor, Joseph, 26, 28 evangelicalism, 107, 116, 285, 313 benefit of immigration to, 118 Catholicism and, 113 the CIA and, 188 missionaries and, 157 opposition to liberal consensus, 113 political advocacy of, 170–71

Index 349 religious liberty and, 168–70 See also National Association of Evangelicals Ewing, William, 31 Falwell, Jerry, 6, 268, 277 opposition to abortion, 270 family power equalizing, 135, 137, 145 district power equalizing and, 133 subsidiarity and, 134, 140 farming, 41, 44–45, 46 LDS and, 85 race and, 43 urban farming, 52 Farr, Thomas F., 171 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 244, 253–54 Federal Council of Churches, 18, 20–21, 25 attempted leadership of labor movements, 32 clerical participation in labor relations, 18, 22, 23, 28 push for Protestant hegemony in United States, 32 revivals for workingmen, 18 strike reporting, 22, 23, 32 support for better labor conditions, 29 support for Woodrow Wilson, 31 theological views of, 30 First Amendment, 154–55 First Things, 281, 283 Fisk University, 63 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 26 Flynn, Ralph, 142–144 Ford, Gerald R., 170, 185, 189 Forman, James, Jr., 127, 144 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 28

foreign policy anti-Semitism and, 162 domestic issues and, 163 humanitarianism and, 164–65 partisanship and, 156, 172 religion and, 156–57, 171–72, 180, 182 religious persecution and, 158, 169 Francis (pope), 313, 316, 319–20 doctrinal views of, 318 Free America, 44 freedom of worship. See religious liberty Friedan, Betty, 202, 205 Friedman, Milton, 125–28, 135, 141–42 Fuller Theological Seminary, 191 Gandhi, Mohandas, 49, 51, 55. See also Gregg, Richard Gann, Paul, 142 Garrigan, Philip, 204–5 Garvey, Marcus, 43 Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, 162 Gingrich, Newt, 155, 157 Giovannitti, Arturo, 18, 24, 25, 26, 31 arrest at Lawrence strike, 26 “conversion” to syndicalism, 25 opposition to Federal Council of Churches, 25, 28–30 poetry of, 26 preaching from the Beatitudes, 25 presence at Sagamore Conference, 30 Protestant background of, 24–25 rejection of orthodox Christianity, 27–28 globalization, 158, 162 Goldner, Isaac, 160 Goldwater, Barry, 90–91, 185 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 170

350 Index Gore, Al, 267 Graham, Billy, 6, 182, 188, 228, 294 Granger Homesteads settlement, 45, 46, 48 ethnic diversity of, 46 Great Basin, 80, 84–85, 88 as promised land, 81 Great Migration, 70 Greenhouse, Linda, 125 Green Revolution, 44 Gregg, Richard, 39 Gandhian agrarianism of, 49–51 opposition to socialism, 50 unconventional spirituality of, 49 “voluntary simplicity” and, 52 Gullixson, Thaddeus F., 106 Haldeman, H. R., 225 Handlin, Oscar, 111 Harlem Renaissance, 65 Hatfield, Mark, 189–93 Haverford College, 57, 253 Hay, John, 163–65 Haywood, William, 26 Hentoff, Nat, 132–33 Herberg, Will, 221 Hill, E. V., 228 Hollinger, David, 317–18, 331–32 Holocaust, 110, 169 Honsberger, Claudia, 213 Hoover, J. Edgar, 254 Houston, Brian, 303 Huddleston, George, 166 Humphrey, Hubert, 114 Hyde, Orson, 85 immigration, 158 Catholics and, 108, 110, 222 Immigration Act of 1965, 103 policy, 101–2

religion and, 102–3, 105, 110–11, 116, 161–62 restriction, 101, 163, 166, 222 of Russian Jews, 161 See also anti-Semitism; Roman ­Catholicism Immigration and Nationality Act (1952). See McCarran-Walter Act Industrial Areas Foundation, 323 industrialism, 37, 40–42, 46–47, 159 industrialization, 158–59 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 17, 27 appeal to middle-class Christian ­reformers, 27 Propaganda League of Boston, 17 relationship with Christian ministers, 17–18, 25 technique of sabotage, 31–32 use of Sermon on the Mount of, 25 welcoming of immigrant and ethnic socialists, 28 industry. See capitalism intelligence missionaries and, 180–82, 186–88, 193–94 religion and, 179, 182 Interchurch World Movement, 32 International Congress on World Evangelization (1974), 188 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), 157, 171 Iron Curtain, 110, 169 McCarran-Walter Act as, 107 Jackson, Henry, 170 Jakes, T. D., 302, 330 James, William, 324, 331 Jarvis, Howard, 142 Jencks, Christopher, 127, 136

Index 351 Jim Crow, 42, 60, 64, 69, 161, 335 John Birch Society, 91, 179 John Paul II (pope), 248, 322, 329 Johnson, Charles S., 83 Johnson, Guy, 63 Johnson, James Weldon, 71 Johnson, Lyndon, 170, 210, 313 Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs (ICMAA), 226–27 John XXIII (pope), 110, 207, 215, 248, 258, 328 Judaism, 107, 114, 202, 226 immigration reform and, 103, 110 Israel and, 110 religious liberty and, 158, 165 See also Russian Jewry Judeo-Christianity, 67, 169, 328. See also tri-faith America Kennedy, John F., 114, 117, 170, 182, 236 Kennedy, Robert F., 182 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 209, 211, 284, 330 Kiwanuka, Joseph, 62, 68–71 Labor Temple (New York), 18, 29 Lansdale, Edward, 184 Latino Pentecostalism. See Pentecostalism Lawrence, Massachusetts, 25, 26 LDS. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), 213–14, 216 Lee, Benjamin Franklin, 66 Lee, Ulysses, 71 Lehman, Herbert, 111, 117 Leo XIII (pope), 256, 322–23, 328

liberal consensus, 104 different goals within, 104–6 promotion of, 107 “surplus” populations and, 109 liberalism, 38, 59 empire and, 167 Phylon and, 59 liberal Protestantism, 8, 40, 331 Black religious practices and, 62–63, 73 Phylon and, 60, 63, 71–72 See also mainline Protestantism Ligutti, Luigi, 39, 43, 47 background, 43–44 Catholic Workers and, 45 differences with John A. Ryan, 45 founding of Granger Homesteads, 45–46 Locke, Alain, 71 Logan, Rayford, 58 LoPezzi, Anna, 26 Ludlow massacre, 20, 22 Lutherans, 250, 269, 271 National Lutheran Council, 102 Luther Theological Seminary, 106 MacEoin, Gary, 188 Macfarland, Charles, 28–29 mainline Protestantism, 39, 52, 107, 313 agrarians and, 52 Christian realism and, 182 critiques of, 40 family planning and, 111–12 immigration reform and, 103–4, 111 manumission, 64 Christian conversion and, 64 Maran, René, 62, 68–71 Roman Catholicism and, 70–71 Marchetti, Victor, 186

352 Index Marks, John D., 186 Martinez, Obed, 300–301 Marxism, 38, 41, 48, 52 Maurin, Peter, 44, 257 Mayers, Richard, 138 McCarran-Walter Act, 101 Catholic views on, 108–9 evangelical support for, 113, 116 mainline Protestant protest of, 114 Truman veto of, 105–6 McCarthy, Joseph, 182 McGroarty, Julia, 203–4, 206 Men and Religion Forward Movement, 19, 30 Mennonites, 190 Merton, Thomas, 251, 258 Methodism, 39, 42, 64, 190–91, 202, 329 Haiti and, 62, 65–67 Meyer, Joyce, 302 Michaux, Elder Solomon Lightfoot, 63, 65 missionaries, 178 critique from global South, 188 espionage and, 179, 181–82, 186–87 government cooperation with, 180, 182, 184–85, 188–92 immigration reform and, 103 missionary children, 183 State Department and, 180 Moe, Terry, 144 Mondale, Walter, 131–32 Montalva, Eduardo Frei, 184 Moore, Arthur J., 190 Mormon culture region, 83, 93 Mormons. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 143 Murray, John Courtney, 326, 328 Myrdal, Gunnar, 63

Nagourney, Adam, 125, 127, 268 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 56–57, 72, 132, 142 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) mainline Protestant defection to, 116 opposition to immigration reform, 113–14 National Catholic Reporter, 187 National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 44, 46, 269 National Council of Churches (NCC), 111, 190–91 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, 295 National Organization for Women (NOW), 202, 205 National Origins Act (1924), 164 National Right to Life, 282 National Security Act (1947), 181 National Security Council, 181 Nearing, Helen, 52 Nearing, Scott, 52 Negritude, 71 Neighborhood Youth Corps, 214 neoliberalism, 8, 126, 300, 303 NETWORK organization, 201–3, 210–11 activities of, 215 founding of, 206 internationalist vision of, 215–16 relationship with CMSW, 214 Neuhaus, Richard John abortion and, 275 career as Lutheran minister, 271 Center on Religion and Society, 280–81 conservative turn, 269 formation of Institute on Religion and Public Life, 281

Index 353 opposition to animal rights movement, 280 opposition to environmentalism, 280 publication of The Naked Public Square, 276 See also First Things New Deal, 39, 42, 46, 52 end of coalition, 225 New Left, 136, 246, 255, 272 environmentalism and, 273 New Republic, 71, 107 Newsome, Effie Lee, 62 “Early Figures in Haitian ­Methodism,” 65 poetry, 65–66 Newsome, Henry Nesby, 66 New Yorker, 131, 316 New York Times, 71, 107, 141–42, 165, 187 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 37, 40, 182, 190 launch of Christianity and Crisis, 185 Nixon, Herman Clarence, 42 Nixon, Richard, 135, 170 “Catholic strategy,” 223–36 See also Spanish-speaking ­Americans Novak, Michael, 187, 210, 226, 284 “Nuns on the Bus Tour,” 201 Obama, Barack, 154, 171, 313–14, 328 Developing Communities Project, 314, 323 progressive faith of, 315–16, 329–33 religious liberty and, 154–55 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 178, 181 O’Grady, John, 106, 108 ecumenical work, 109 opposition to immigration restriction, 108 Operation Rescue, 283

organized labor, 17–18, 20 religious leaders and, 19, 21, 28, 30, 32 use of Christian language, 25–26 See also Christianity; Industrial Workers of the World; Social Gospel Osteen, Joel, 302–3 overpopulation, 109, 111–12, 114–15 Pacem in Terris, 258 Palmer, Edward Nelson, 62–65 “The Religious Acculturation of the Negro,” 63–65 Paul VI (pope), 211, 262–63, 322 Peace Corps, 58 Pentecostalism Azusa Street revival, 293 “hard” prosperity, 299 in Latin America, 297–98 Latino Pentecostalism, 238 —apocalypticism of, 298 —Democratic engagement with, 291 —frameworks for interpreting social mobility, 292 —growth of, 292 —megachurches, 294, 296, 299, 301–3 —possible trajectories of, 306 —relationship to Black and white churches, 307 —Republican engagement with, 290–91, 300 “progressive Pentecostalism,” 294 religious persecution and, 170 “soft” prosperity, 302–3, 306 Perlman, Philip B., 106 Perry, Jonathan, 306 Phillips, Kevin, 230 “Latin Crescent,” 229, 238

354 Index Phylon journal editorial direction, 58, 71–72 global Black perspective, 58–59 religion and, 59, 60, 62, 67–68, 70–71 social science and, 59–60, 61, 73 Pickett, Clarence E., 106 Pinkos, Henry, 159–60 Pius IX (pope), 325–26 Pius XI (pope), 44, 70, 325 Pius XII (pope), 70, 109, 215 support for immigration, 110 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 282, 284 Plowshares, 261–62 pluralism, 3, 7, 60, 276, 316 Catholicism and, 69 Haiti and, 66 liberal Protestantism, 60–61 Phylon and, 60 race and, 60 Podhoretz, Norman, 274–75 Pollan, Michael, 52 Portenar, A. J., 31 Pouget, Émile, 26 Presbyterians, 25, 115, 190 President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, 101–2 creation of, 105–6 faith-based organizations and, 102 hearings, 102 report of, 106 Proposition 8 (California), 79 Proposition 13 (California), 139–40, 142 Protestant Episcopal Church, 102, 114–15 Protestantism, 23, 27, 202 Anglo-Protestantism, 26, 28 liberal Protestantism, 27, 32 organized labor and, 22–23, 29

Orthodox Protestantism, 19 See also evangelicalism; liberal Protestantism; mainline Protestantism Ramirez, Henry M., 232–33, 235, 237 Ransom, John Crowe, 39 background, 39 centrality of farming to, 41 “economic interpretation of religion” and, 40 publication of I’ll Take My Stand, 39 race and, 42–43 religious views of, 40–41 turn to the arts, 43 Rashke, Richard L., 187 Rauschenbush, Walter, 32, 325, 330 Rawe, John C., 46–48 Read, Joel Ellen, 205 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 9, 39, 126, 156 religious liberty and, 170–71 vouchers and, 126–27 Reconstruction, 161, 335 refugees, 101, 184, 216, 222, 293 Reid, Ira De A., 57 religion, 62 agrarians and, 41–42 as challenge to capitalism, 37–38 decline of, 318 immigration reform and diversity of, 103 importance of, 105 limits of consensus, 104–5 partisan divide of, 156 politics and, 203, 238 as wedge issue, 236 women and, 202 religious liberty, 154–55 diplomacy and, 157–58, 162–63, 167 domestic issues and, 163–64

Index 355 history of, 158 humanitarian intervention and, 165–67 as litmus test, 158, 167 moral issues and, 164 Republican interest in, 157 religious right, 10, 156, 262, 277 Christian Coalition, 268 Council for National Policy, 277 Moral Majority, 277 Remnick, David, 316 Republican Party, 155–56, 262, 267 Latino Pentecostalism, 306 National Convention, 1, 237, 267 religion and, 4, 157, 291, 325 Ridolfi, Kathleen (Cookie), 244 “Camden 28” group, 254 career as a lawyer, 263–64 the Catholic Left and, 244, 252, 256 non-Catholic identity of, 245, 250–51 relationship to Mary Cain Scoblick, 252–53 traditional gender roles and, 260–61 Riles, Wilson, 140–41 Ritter, Joseph, 108 Robertson, Pat, 276–77 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 32 Roe v. Wade, 262, 270, 282 Catholics and, 247, 275 Roman Catholicism, 27, 57, 107 aggiornamente, 260 agrarianism and, 44–45, 48–49 anti-communism, 168, 182, 184 anti-socialist views of, 23–24 as “bad” religion, 66 Catholic Left, 245, 249–50, 257, 260 centrality of the family to, 47 CIA and, 188 consecration of bishops, 69

economic views of, 320, 322 encyclicals —Caritatis in Veritate, 322 —“Evangelii Gaudium,” 319–20, 322, 325, 331 —Gaudium et Spes, 209–10, 212, 259, 322 —Humanae Vitae, 262 —Laudato Si, 319, 322 —Lumen Gentium, 209–10 —Rerum Novarum, 256, 321–23, 325 ethnic conflict and, 70 immigration reform and, 103, 108–9 labor movement and, 324 Latino Catholicism and, 223–24 National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), 107 National Conference of Catholic Charities, 106 opposition to vouchers, 142–43 organized labor and, 23, 25 pluralism and, 320–21, 326 progressive tradition, 256, 314, 320–23, 325, 329 Protestant fears of, 104 relics and, 69 sex abuse scandal, 316 Syllabus of Errors, 325 Ultramontane Catholicism, 325 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 20, 44 Vatican relationship to American Catholics, 206–7 women religious and, 204–5 See also Catholic Worker; Day, Dorothy Romney, Mitt, 155–56, 317 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 46 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 167–68, 181

356 Index Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (cont.) “Black Cabinet” and, 58 Four Freedoms speech, 169 Lend-Lease assistance and, 168 Roosevelt, Theodore, 164, 166 conservation efforts of, 86 Russia, 169–70 1832 treaty with, 160–61, 166 pogroms in, 159 treatment of American Jews, 159–60 United States protests against, 160–61, 163–64 Russian Jewry, 158 immigration of, 158, 162 Russian Christians and, 170 Russian treatment of naturalized American citizens, 159–60 view of United States, 159 violence against, 163, 165–66 Russian Orthodoxy, 168 Ryan, John A., 45, 48, 324–25, 328, 330 Ryan, Leo, 137, 140–41 Ryan, Paul, 201 Sagamore Conference, 28–30 Salatin, Joel, 52 San Diego Teachers Association, 142 Santorum, Rick, 155, 157 Scammon, Richard, 230 school choice, 127, 132, 138–39, 144 school vouchers, 125, 141, 143–44 conservative support for, 126, 134–35 equity and, 127, 132–33, 135 poverty and, 127, 131, 133 sectarian education and, 131, 136 See also district power equalizing; family power equalizing Schumacher, E. F., 52–53 Scoblick, Mary Cain, 252–53

segregation, 42, 46, 64 immigration and, 167 literacy test and, 166 property taxes and, 129–30 school choice and, 132 in schools, 128–30 See also education Sermon on the Mount, 25 Serrano v. Priest, 130–31 settlement houses, 28, 31 Seven Sisters, 206 Shanker, Albert, 141–42 Shapiro, Edward S., 49 Sheen, Fulton, 182 Sheil, Bernard, 323 Sierra Club, 279, 284 Silent Majority, 225, 230–31 Simms, Florence, 20 Sister Formation Conference (SFC), 207 Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, 204, 208 Sisters of Social Service, 201, 208 Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHMs), 211 Sizer, Theodore, 136, 143 slavery, 43, 59, 64, 277, 329 Smeltzer, Ralph E., 112–13 Smith, Adam, 38 Smith, John Henry, 86 Smith, Joseph, 7, 80, 91 Smoot, Reed, 86 Social Gospel, 18, 330 agrarian opposition to, 38 definition, 38 divine moral order and, 19 histories of, 32 missionary zeal of, 21, 25 social concerns of, 19, 20, 23, 315, 322 See also Christianity; Protestantism

Index 357 socialism, 17, 23, 31, 44, 50 agrarian critique of, 40 as alternative Christian church, 21, 24 significant growth of, 28–29 See also Christian Socialism Socialist Party of America, 28 social science, 59–60 Phylon and, 58, 61 Sojourners, 191, 193 Spanish-speaking Americans, 222, 297 defining constituency of, 226–27, 230–31 Nixon’s “Catholic strategy,” 224, 231 tension between Ethnic-Catholics and, 223 tension between Black Democrats and, 229 Spellman, Francis, 183 Spelman College, 58 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 202 State Department, 178 International Religious Freedom Act (RFA) and, 171 missionaries and, 180 Russia and, 161, 166 Stelzle, Charles, 28–29 Strickland, Frederick Guy, 24 strikes, 22–23, 25–26 Federal Council reports on, 22–23, 32 patriotic songs and, 26 religion and, 24–27 Suenens, Léon-Joseph, 208, 211 Sugarman, Stephen, 127, 129, 135–36 ballot initiative and, 141 constitutional questions and, 143–44

school choice and, 138–40 See also Coons, John ( Jack); school vouchers Supreme Court, 125, 138, 144 Swanstrom, Edward E., 110 Sylvester, Nancy, 210 Synagogue Council of America, 102 syndicalism, 25, 27, 30, 31 Talezaar, Jacob, 23 Tannenbaum, Frank, 17 Tate, Allen, 39, 41, 43 Taylor, Charles, 331 Terry, Randall, 283 Thomas, M. Carey, 206 Tobin, Mary Luke, 211–12, 215–17 Tomlinson, Homer A., 102 Tower, John, 185 Traxler, Margaret Ellen, 210–11 tri-faith America, 104, 109, 221. See also Christianity; Judaism; Protestantism; Roman Catholicism Trinity College, 202–3, 205, 215 model for, 206 Truman, Harry S. immigration and, 101–2, 105, 108 “religious Cold War” and, 169, 171 Trump, Donald, 171, 313–14, 334 Ubangi-Shari. See Central African ­Republic unions, 21–22, 24–25, 31 Federal Council of Churches and, 22–23 religious leaders and, 18, 19, 23, 29 religious overtones of, 25–26 See also organized labor Union Theological Seminary, 25, 27 United Church of Christ, 115, 190, 315

358 Index United Fruit Company, 183 United Nations, 44, 54, 57, 60 United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), 128, 232 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 157 United States Department of Agriculture, 88–89 United States Office of Education (USOE), 128–29 United States Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, 131–32 urbanization, 37, 41, 47 Vatican I, 325 Vatican II, 203, 205, 207, 216, 313, 322 impact on women religious, 208, 210–11, 215, 260 progressive intent of, 326, 328, 330 women auditors of, 211–12 Vekemans, Roger, 184 Vietnam Catholic opposition to war in, 215–26, 245–46 CIA and, 184, 187 Village Voice, 131 Wagner, C. Peter, 191 Wallis, Jim, 191, 330 Wall Street Journal, 144, 284 Ward, Harry, 17–18, background, 21 political views of, 19–20 primary loyalty to the institutional church, 20–21 rejection of “revolutionary” Christianity, 21, 31–32

The Social Creed of the Churches and, 20, 22, 31 —endorsement by Federal Council, 20 —opposition from organized labor, 22–23 Warren, Rick, 330 Washington, Booker T., 43 Washington, Harold, 315 Washington Post, 135, 187, 238, 254 Wattenberg, Benjamin, 230 Weather Underground, 255 Weeks, Rufus, 24 Welch, Robert, 179 welfare state, 39 agrarian opposition to quantification, 38 Wells Memorial Institute, 31 Weyrich, Paul, 277 White, Mel, 191 White, Walter, 57 White Fathers, 68 Whitten, Phillip, 136 Widtsoe, John A., 87–88, 92–93 Wilberforce University, 65 Wilczynski, Marx, 159–60 Wills, Garry, 187 Wilson, M. L., 45 Wilson, Woodrow, 168 Witt, Marcos, 301 women religious, 213 civil rights movement and, 209 reform of, 208–9 See also Roman Catholicism Wood, James E., 190 World Council of Churches, 101, 111 Refugee Service, 101 World Vision International, 190 Wright, Jeremiah, 315–16

Index 359 Young, Brigham, 81, 91 communitarian vision of, 85, 88 opposition to mining, 84 YMCA, 19

Zahn, Gordon, 247, 262–63 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 125–28, 138, 144–45 Zeublin, Charles, 29 Zionism, 110